Field notes
Guides and honest answers about buying raw land, living on it, and making the most of your acreage. No jargon, no pressure, just what we would tell a friend.
Articles tagged due diligence. 21 articles.
Most banks are not built to lend on small rural vacant land, and the handful that are want terms that defeat the purpose. Here is why, when a bank actually is the right call, and what owner financing costs by comparison.
BLM land next door is a real feature and one of the few raw-land features buyers search for. It also does not give you a way in, and it is not permanent. What the statutes and BLM own numbers actually say, and the two free maps to check before you buy.
Three tiers, not one, and the cost spread between them is the size of a house. What off-grid actually saves you, which is less than you have read, what the statutes really say about rainwater, and how to test the life before you commit to it.
Raw land can be entirely real, entirely titled and entirely taxed current, and still be a parcel you cannot legally drive to or get a septic permit on. Five questions catch almost all of it, four of them are free, and all five are answerable before you send a dollar.
Nobody publishes a national average for bringing utilities to raw land, and the figures that get quoted everywhere came from other blogs. Here is how to get a real number for your own parcel, using the tariffs and well logs your utility and your state already publish for free.
A street address and a mailing address are two different jobs, and plenty of counties will not assign the first one to bare land at all. What the counties actually charge, what USPS actually allows, and how to have your mail sorted this week.
Legal access and physical access are two different things, and the gap between them is where buyers get burned. What the three kinds of access actually mean, what the fix really costs when nobody will publish a number, and the five checks to run before you sign.
Rainwater harvesting is not illegal in Colorado and has not been since 2016. Here is the real state-by-state picture, the arithmetic for how much water a roof produces, and the parts that go wrong, including which roofing materials poison the water.
Nobody should buy a water filter before they have a lab report. Private wells are unregulated, about a quarter of sampled wells exceed a health benchmark, and the cause is usually geology rather than pollution. Here is what to test for and what each treatment actually removes.
Two different things are called a soil test and confusing them costs real money. One tells you what to put on the garden. The other decides whether you can ever legally live on the parcel. Here is how to tell them apart and which to pay for first.
Land without an address is not land without a record. How to identify any parcel from a map, a coordinate or a neighbor, what the county actually holds on it, and why the unclaimed property database everyone recommends will never find you land.
Most articles on this explain two legal doctrines and never answer the question you actually have: can you drill a well on this parcel. Here is the exempt well rule for all ten states we sell in, the two acreage thresholds that decide it, and how to check before you buy.
While you are here
Pima County, AZOcotillo, cholla and prickly pear crowd a raised, flat pad across the middle of this acre, the natural spot for a home with a view of the Tucson Mountains. It sits in Diamond Bell Ranch about 33 miles west of Tucson, at 3,297 feet where summers run a little milder. Cell service is strong, and the zoning lets you build when you're ready.
Putnam County, FLArea photosHoot Owl Road is paved and power runs right past the lot, which is more than most of this old Satsuma subdivision can say. It's a quarter acre in St. Johns River country, twelve minutes from Palatka and a short run to Dunn's Creek and Crescent Lake. The lot is mapped wetland and most of it sits in a FEMA flood zone, so it's priced for what it is today.
Hudspeth County, TXArea photosGuadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, sits about a half hour east of this ground, and the salt flats that set off a war in 1877 are closer than that. It's open desert outside Salt Flat, Texas, with no zoning and no HOA, so you can pitch a tent this weekend and build off-grid whenever you get around to it.
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