How did you get your land?

We found our place on the Interwebs.. More as a joke between us is how it happened..

My wife had talked every now and then about moving away and growing chickens in WV..

We had looked at a listing here and there over the years, but only out of curiosity.. Never serious about it.. We had never looked at any place in person.. (OK, we did look at one place a few years ago, but it was a restaurant we were thinking about turning into a biker BBQ and band destination) (funny story on that.. a guy and his wife did buy it about a year later.. then it failed a year after that since they couldn't get a liquor license)

One day last year my wife sent me a listing as a joke while we were at work... a nice piece of land, but the house on it would have to be torn down and a new one built.. She was mostly saying "Here.. we could live in a falling down shack".. saying she was tired of this area and was willing to move to a shack to get outta here.... We both knew we could never afford to build a new house even if we got free land.. .

So as a joke, I found another listing within a few minutes and sent it back to her... Then we both got to really looking at it and talking about it.. It was something we could afford, and it was a great deal because the house needed some work and the place was junked up..

So that night we decide to call the listing agent.. We made an appointment for that weekend to see it.. Mostly to just kick the tires and get a road trip in..

We made an offer the next day, and within two more we signed a contract..

We had never really been serious about buying a place, and especially would have never imagined we could afford a place with as much land as we got..

We still kind of laugh about how it all came about, but man are we so excited about getting the house in good enough shape that we can move in next summer..

So basically, it was a spur of the moment purchase..

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Never let your fear decide your fate!
Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit

I bought my place after looking for 2 years. Bought it from the owner, with a 20% down through the bank. Bare land with no improvements. Now I am selling and looking for my last place little homestead. Never thought I would sell after this long.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

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Be yourself - no one can tell you that you're doing it wrong!

Mine was my Grandparents homestead. I knew from at a very young age I wanted to live there. Was able to purchase it before Grandma passed on.

WWW

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If the grass looks greener it is probably over the septic tank. - troy n sarah tx

Our existance here is soley for the expoitation of CMG

I've done it both ways. We had a Realtor that worked hard for us, we looked at least 20 places until we bought this cabin and 113 acres. I inherited the family farm (in another county) with my brother so that's another 366 acres.

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People say I can't multi-task. Well, I can tick you off and amuse myself at the same time.

Juuust bought 5 acres. How we ended up finding it was though word of mouth. The extent of the advertising on this was a 8.5 x 11" sign on the property.....on a road no one goes down unless you're going to the property. We looked pretty much everywhere. We looked at any website that had land/realty for sale, checked with realtors, watched for signs, read bulletin boards, and asked around. Most valuable was knowing someone who is very well connected in the farming and homesteading communities within the region. He let us know about the land we ended up buying (and was able to tell us about our neighbors) as well as a few other pieces that may have worked for us.

We ended up settling on a "big enough" piece of land. We were initially hoping for more, but decided that while we probably will never be able to cover all of our heating from firewood off of our land and won't have room to plant fruit trees (sigh) - we could buy it outright and be able to very comfortably pay for everything involved in building the (small) home we want and do all the things that come with building on land - well, driveway, etc. We'll have to buy/obtain firewood each year, and buy apples for making applesauce. But we have enough land to do what we really want to do and without a mortgage. Our way of dealing with finding a property within our small-ish price range was to figure out what we really need to do what we want - feel like we have our own space, a bit of woods to play in, large garden, and a few animals. Buying firewood and apples each year is a small price to pay for owning your own land and everything on it. Plus then we're able to buy from others in the area - and I like that. :-)

sorry so long (I'm still pretty flipping excited about our newly bought land!)

Okay Dirt Man
Just where are you located?
I am also here in NW Michigan near Traverse City.

Was very patient (years) and shopped around alot. Suddenly my wife found a foreclosure listed online that we could pay cash for. Needless to say, we got the ball rolling quickly.

Like others have said. Be prepared and have everything (financing if needed, etc.) up front. It makes the whole process go ALOT smoother.

We started looking for 20 acres off and on for about 5 years while I was preparing to retire from the Army. We’d been saving for close to the entire time I served, so we had enough cash for basically the whole 20. We found 40 we liked in 2003, made a low offer which they accepted. We then spent the next 4 years paying that off, meanwhile making improvements to the drainage, dam, pond banks etc. (9 acre pond) and saving for construction.

Just when we were getting ready to start the building process, in 08 the back 40 acres came open. So we bought that too, which resulted in using all the money we had for a down payment on the construction. So, we paid that 40 off in 3 years and started saving again for construction which we finished this past May.

So total for us was an 80 acre, 9 year project, funded by a 23 year career (4 deployments, 3 overseas tours), plus 4 years as a contractor, 5 years as a DA civilian (so far).

Go in with both eyes open, have financing secured, and estimate that EVERYTHING will cost way more than you believe it will.

It will be worth it.

Chuck

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Might does not make right, but it sure makes what is.

We bought this 10ac last year. We had been searching for probably 3-4 years, looking for somewhere bigger than the 3ac we had.

The problem with realtors is they usually want to show you what they want to show you - not necessarily what you want. Usually prices higher than you want to pay, too. A friend sent me a couple of places that were foreclosures, and this place was one of them. It isn't perfect, nor will the house interior ever be unless I win the lottery, but it has pretty much everything we wanted and the price was definitely right.

Mary

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In politics the truth is just the lie you believe most - unknown

Like chewie, I live in an area where it's either 2 acres, which is nothing but a large yard on the western plains, or 200, which is unaffordable.
Finding anything in between is very difficult.

We waited and watched for several years before we found 40 acres. Not quite as much as we'd wanted, but who knows how long we would've waited to get something just a little bigger! lol

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~*~Erin~*~
SAHM, ranch wife, sub and quilt shop proprietress
the Back Gate Country Quilt Shop

We looked for land for 7 years - land is very expensive in the UK, especially small parcels which tend to be taken by the rich 'horsey set'. We asked everywhere we went if there was any land for sale and then a friend was selling up her smallholding as she was splitting up with her partner. We put the finances in place to buy, then decided against it as it had a lot of problems.
We then put an ad on the front page of our local town newspaper saying exactly what we were looking for. Within a day we had a call from a man who had been trying to sell his land up for 5 years - eleven acres, road access and water. We bought it on sight.

Yeah MoonShine, no wills here either (daddys people moved here from Holland to acquire land but didnt manage to hold onto it)...
We looked for 15 years up and down the state of CA.... Partially for the grandparents (would have really helped for the child we had) and then ended up (they moved to Florida, where they over bought ) looking for ourselves. Looked at 50 odd places the 6months before we bought it- another 6 in escrow d/t some complications, stopped off at a foreclosure sale that had an unusable septic-- house had nice bones, and after some haggling had 2 acres (and county permits plus another 40K, another new septic)....
Thats how we got our land. And yes you have to have finances in place. We refinanced on our condo and bought it cash.

We looked and looked for over a year for 50 acres with no luck. The State highway dept. was taking our whole front yard up in town and we knew it was time to get. I road every back road, talk to every person I could think of to no avail. I finally figured that I was going to have to settle for a small lot just outside of town. I had my Uncle come and look at the lot and how we could lay the house out. I had planned to do some of the building along with his help. He was in the middle of having the family farm re-surveyed because it had not been done in 70 some years. Well to his surprise there was more land there than he thought.

Long story short I bought that land and started building a road in. It took us almost a year to get the roads, infrastructure and house built. As some others have said...best thing I ever done. Now I'm the 4th generation to live and farm the land. Like TnAndy......I'm 7 years into a 30 year project.

We bought our land back in the 1980's at the bottom of one of the previous housing/land market dips. Did a mortgage with the previous owner, paying them about a third up front and then monthly payments. This worked well for them tax-wise and well for us. Avoided a lot of bank fees. We had a lawyer draw up the papers and do the title search. Our land is up in the mountains, rocky and steep so that helped to keep the cost down.

To find it I drew circles on the map around the things that were important to me. I then looked at the areas of overlap. Venn Diagrams. Next I contact the town offices in those areas asking about zoning, permitting and reading their town reports to get a sense of the places. I already knew the area fairly well but was double checking everything.

Then I started watching the classifieds, bulletin boards and real estate ads for land in the areas of interest. Looking at topo maps I was able to learn a lot about the properties. I checked deeds looking for loss of rights, etc. Visiting properties gave me a sense of the lands. I talked with neighbors. Then contacted sellers.

It took a few years. Good things take time.

Cheers,

-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Southern Oregon land is crazy expensive (we all blame the Californians), so when we felt we needed to get back to land, gardening and SPACE around us we had to go out as far as we could to find something affordable. We had to find a place pretty fast due to work and went with the first place we found that felt good and had enough space. Is it perfect? No, but it's just fine. We have a mortgage, but it's affordable even if everything falls apart. I think it's really hard in this day and age to save enough to buy a place outright, you could waste your whole life just saving, just don't get in over your head with a mortgage.

I should add my sister and her husband just spent 5 years looking for the perfect place in Idaho, and it was a place they hadn't bothered to look at because it was too close to a road. When it dropped in price they looked and discovered it met all of their criteria and it was way above the road so that wasn't a big deal. So always go look, you never know...

We found the area where we wanted to buy then I book marked every realtor website that operated in that area, & checked them weekly. Got all our finances together so when we found something that came up we were in the position to grab it right away. We love our place.

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Debt is Normal be Weird!-Dave Ramsey
We are DEBT FREE!! as of Feb 21, 2008

I was always a frugal child, I had a good nest egg to start with, that and some help from family got us the property. We saw the add in the local "penny saver" type paper. Paid cash for the land and to build the barn. Had to have a mortgage to build the house, but we started with equity as the land was paid for. Two and a half years and it will be paid off.

We started looking back in 06. This is the vary first place we looked at. It was more of a lark then just a nice day for a drive in the country. We were looking for 10-20 acres under $50,000. This place was 36 acres and they wanted $350,000. Way out of our price range. Boy when we walked the land I knew its what I wanted. Rolling land forest 2 miles from anyone but way more money than it was worth or we had. Like I said it was a nice drive out in the country anyhow. So for the next two years we looked while looking the price on this place kept coming down. We ended up getting it for a pretty good deal with a good interest rate and owner financing. We did pay a third down cash and have 15 years to go on a 20 year note. The monthly payment is less than most car payments. We found it and many other places on the net and spent a lot of time / money driving all over looking. It was great fun!

Larry
A World Away

Found it here on HT in the realty forum, shortly after I got hired for my current gig. Right place, right time, and trusting God that this is what we were supposed to be doing.

It all just came together.

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Je ne suis pas Alice

http://homesteadingfamilies.proboards.com/