Land & Real Estate Forum

What this board is for

Finding, evaluating, and buying off-grid land: access, water, soil, zoning, covenants, title, financing, and the negotiation. It is also the board for the after-the-fact questions, which are usually harder, about what to do with a parcel that turned out to have a defect nobody checked for.

Land questions get much better answers than they used to, because a great deal of the relevant public data is now reachable in a few seconds. What still cannot be automated is the local knowledge: what the county actually enforces, what the drillers find at that depth, and which road is impassable in March.

The questions that come up most

Is the access legal? The defect that ends the most projects. Physical access and legal access are different, and a track everyone has always used is not a right you own. Look for a recorded easement with a width and a purpose in the title work.

Will there be water? Ask local drillers about the district, look at neighboring well reports, and treat the absence of both as a serious unknown rather than an optimistic one. You can add solar to almost any parcel and you cannot add groundwater.

What will the county allow? Zoning, minimum dwelling size, occupancy during construction, and septic approval, in that order of how often they surprise people.

Is this price reasonable? Local, and the discount on a parcel with a defect should be real rather than notional. Raw land with no access, no water, and no approvable wastewater system is not cheap land; it is a different product.

What a useful answer looks like here

Post the state and county, the acreage, the asking price, and what you know about access, water, and wastewater. A link to the listing helps and a parcel number helps more, because it lets anyone look at the same public records you are looking at.

Then say what your plan is, because the same parcel is excellent for one plan and impossible for another. A seasonal cabin, a permitted permanent dwelling, and a place to park a camper while building are three different legal questions on identical ground.

The mistakes that cost the most here

Relying on physical access without a recorded easement. A track everyone has always driven is not a right you own, and curing that defect after closing is expensive and sometimes impossible.

Making an offer without a contingency period for a soil test and a title search. Both are standard, both are reasonable, and both move the risk to where it belongs.

Reading the county rules and not the recorded covenants. A subdivision can prohibit exactly what the county permits, and it is enforced by neighbors rather than by an office.

Assuming water rights come with the land, which in much of the west they may not.

And buying in June without seeing the road in March. Many rural roads are legally public and not maintained in winter, and some carry weight limits during thaw.

Due diligence in the order that saves money

Start with public data, because it is free and fast: flood and wetland mapping, slope, road data, and the county rules picture. That narrows a list of ten parcels to three without leaving the house.

Then visit, with a checklist, ideally in the awkward season. Walk the boundaries rather than the middle, look for standing water and evidence of use by others, and stand for ten minutes where the house would go and listen.

Then spend money on certainty, in this order: title search for access and covenants, soil evaluation for the wastewater system, and a conversation with a local driller about water. Those three answers cost a fraction of a bad purchase.

The parcel check and the site report cover the first stage, the printed checklist the second, and lesson two the whole sequence.

Owner financing and the paperwork

Seller financing is common in rural land and can suit both sides, and the headline monthly payment is the least informative number in the agreement. Look at the rate, the term, the amortization, whether there is a balloon and when, and what your realistic plan is for meeting it on a parcel no bank will refinance.

Ask who holds title during the term. In a contract for deed the seller may retain the deed until the final payment, which changes what happens on a default, in some states substantially. A note and mortgage with the deed conveyed at closing is generally the stronger position for a buyer.

Get a title search regardless of how straightforward the seller seems, confirm the agreement is recorded, and have an attorney read it. These are small costs against the size of the transaction and this is exactly the situation they exist for.

How much of this is regional

Everything. Water law, zoning authority, septic administration, property tax treatment, and the culture of enforcement all differ by state, and within a state the county or town is usually the unit that matters. Two parcels twenty minutes apart can be governed entirely differently.

Market conditions vary just as much. What counts as a fair price per acre, whether seller financing is common, how long parcels sit, and whether a title search will turn up severed mineral rights are all local knowledge.

That is why a listing link plus a state and county gets far better answers here than a general question, and why the answer usually ends with a phone number rather than a conclusion.

Where the money is actually lost

Not usually on the purchase price. It is lost on the parcel that cannot be permitted, the access that was never recorded, the septic system that needed engineering, the driveway that turned out to be a quarter mile of fill, and the well that went twice as deep as the neighbors' did.

Each of those is discoverable in advance for a few hundred dollars in tests and searches, which is why the sequence matters more than the negotiation. Contingency periods exist precisely so that the expensive checks happen before the money moves.

And the cheapest check of all is a phone call to the planning office and the health department, describing the actual plan for the actual parcel. The printable questions sheet exists for that call.

The lesson that covers this

Lesson 2: Picking the land (before you fall in love with it) in the free course works through this subject in the order the decisions actually arrive. Learn the five questions that decide whether a parcel can be lived on at all, and how to answer them before you sign.

The whole course is twelve lessons, free, with no account required to read any of it: start at the beginning if you are new to this, or jump straight to the lesson above if you are not.

Tools for this topic

Most questions on this board come down to a number somebody has not worked out yet. These do the arithmetic and show their working, so an answer here can be checked rather than taken on faith.

• Land check: check a specific parcel against public flood, wetland, slope and access data
• Site report: get any address its real climate, sun and distance figures
• Off grid laws: read the rules for the county or town

How this board works

Posting needs an account, which exists so that answers have a name attached and so that the same person can be asked a follow-up six months later. It costs nothing and it is not used for anything else.

The conventions here are the ones that make a small forum useful. Say where you are, at least to the state or region, because almost every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules. Say what you have already, and what you have already tried. Give numbers where you have them, and say when you are guessing. And when something works or fails, come back and say which, because the thread is read by far more people than post in it.

Answers here should be able to say where they came from. Experience is welcome and so is a rule of thumb, as long as it is labeled as one. Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the reader on the other end may be about to spend money or wire something themselves.

Boards next door

Off-grid questions rarely stay inside one department. A water question is often a power question underneath, and a land question is usually several at once. These boards field the neighboring subjects:

• Water: Collection, storage, filtration, and pumps: getting clean, reliable water when there is no tap to turn on.
• Sanitation: Composting toilets, greywater, and staying clean and healthy off the grid without a septic hookup.
• Money & Finance: The real cost of going off-grid and how to fund it: honest budgets, making a living remotely, insurance, taxes, and hard...
• Transition & First-Year: What the first year off-grid is really like: honest timelines, the mistakes almost everyone makes, easing in instead of ...

Asking a question that gets a good answer

The difference between a thread that gets three useful replies and one that gets none is almost always in the first post. Four things do most of the work: where you are, what you already have, what you have already tried, and what you are actually trying to achieve.

Location matters because nearly every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules, and the same question has different right answers in Vermont and Arizona. What you have matters because advice that assumes different equipment wastes everyone's time. What you have tried stops people repeating it. And the goal matters because the best answer is frequently that the problem should be solved somewhere else entirely: a load reduced rather than a battery added, a parcel checked rather than a design revised.

Numbers beat adjectives. Give the figure where you have one and say plainly when you are guessing, because a guess labeled as a guess is useful and a guess presented as a measurement sends people down the wrong path.

Answering well, and the standard here

Experience is the most valuable thing on a board like this, and it is most valuable when it comes with its conditions attached: what you have, where, for how long, and what went wrong along the way. A rule of thumb is welcome when it is labeled as one.

Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the person reading may be about to wire something themselves or spend a large amount of money. Direct-current faults, combustion appliances, and structural decisions are not places for confident approximations, and saying you are not sure is a genuine contribution rather than a failure.

It is also worth saying when something has changed. Equipment, prices, and regulations all move, and an answer that was right three years ago can be wrong now.

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