I’m gonna go over 6 mistakes to avoid when buying raw land for your homestead. This is 6 more mistakes to avoid. I have found a whole lot more mistakes that people have made that they have told us about, and wow. Like it’s blown my mind of some of these things that you need to make sure that you do not do before you are buying your homestead.
You’re interested in buying some sort of raw land. But just for you all who have not fully understand everything, the world is going crazy. And so buying raw land could be a good way that you could get some freedom in your life.
So let’s get started to save you on these mistakes right now.
Number 1
The first mistake to avoid when buying raw land for your homestead. Y’all, it is waiting too long. Don’t wait too long before you buy. We all know that inflation is getting insane.
Land prices, you all it’s going it’s skyrocketing. I really hate that land prices have gone up so much. To where you can see this article where I give you some ideas of how to make more money right now. So that you can homestead with a little bit less money.
Meaning that, yes. You need to find a way to get some different ideas to be able to make more money. So where you can save more money to be able to do that. But in terms of waiting before you buy, if you were just kind of in on the fence of whether or not you can, but you have some financial capital, you have a steady job, you have a way to be able to get a second loan, like you have a mortgage and you want to maybe do some raw land, I would not wait. I would risk it.
I would risk it in order to buy that land. That sounds silly for what we did in our mid thirties, and we bought a second property. It become with the aid of using a ways the satisfactory selection that we’ve ever made in our life. But besides having kids and getting married, just it was the best. And yes, I feel horrible.
We always get the email of, we are where you were 5 years ago. And to think what land prices were 5 years ago and to what they are now, it is just idiocracy. So wait a minute. What you are announcing is which you need us to place water at the crops? Yes.
Water. Like out the toilet? Do your best now to get your finances in order so that whenever you start looking for property, you are ready to be able to put down some option money. That’s what we they call here in Texas. I’ll talk about it later in the next article.
But put down an option to be able to take the property off the market. It’s usually like maybe a 100, $150. At least that’s what it was back in 2015 when we bought this. Depending on the amount of land that you’re buying. But what that is a small amount of money that is really worth it to take the property off of the market. So then you can really study it and make sure that that is a good option. So basically, put the option money down. So that then you have 10 days in order to not make the rest of the mistakes in this article.
Number 2
So number 2. The second mistake that you need to avoid before buying raw land for your homestead. Number 2 is not having a nearby hospital. I know what some of you might be saying you weak little baby pan. Pull up your big boy gene. I got £64.
I got £64 of MRE that I’m not at Costco. I got my guns, my ammo. Go run to your mama with your boogles and your little scrapes. You might get hurt because you might, have an animal hurt you or you’re running a chainsaw or something. I mean, you even if you have kids, you know that you need access to a hospital somewhere. It’s a very important thing to be somewhat close to medical attention. Alright, y’all.
Number 3
The 3rd mistake to avoid is buying too small of a property. Now this is a tough one for me because I am fully in the camp that you can homestead in suburbia. You can even do some sort of self sustaining homesteading things in the city by baking sourdough, putting some potted plants out on a balcony. There’s things that you can do. And you don’t have to have a giant piece of property to be able to homestead. But here in 2022, we’re talking about slightly different things now. Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland.
We have BlackRock, an investment company up in New York that’s buying a lot of homes, and property values are skyrocketing. If it’s just you or a spouse, it probably doesn’t matter. Then you’re probably not gonna have kids that are gonna want that property as a legacy. So I’m really focused on the family, the the husband and wife that have kids that are young, and they’re gonna grow up on a piece of property. You’re gonna wanna have some sort of financial freedom for your kids.
And by that, what I mean is, like, let’s take my property for instance. So we have 7 and a half acres here, and here, it’s good. We can do everything that we possibly want. And Kelly and I were a little bit kinda like not really at odds, but we’re kinda have different, opinions. Are our kids going to be able to afford to buy land whenever they’re adults?
And that’s where the legacy comes in. I’m sort of skeptical. I’m guessing I’m glass is half empty kinda guy that these home prices, these land prices, this inflation is going to get too high for them. And so my thought process is if you’re able to get 20, maybe 40 acres, that’s insane to be able to think it because it’s a lot of money especially now. But if you’re able to get a loan for that, it is worth.
And y’all, I am all for debt freedom. Like, that’s the craziness. I’m all for debt freedom, but times are different now to where if you can leverage 30 years, and you can be able to raise children, and then they can have a piece of your property to be able to build a small home on and raise a family, you really can’t ask for anything more than that. Like, that is the holy grail of legacy in my opinion besides, like, teaching your kids about God. Like, all of these things, it is a passion of mine, so I get a little amped up.
But if you only get 2 to 5 acres, you are very limited to a legacy that you can be able to give to your children. If you have if you have one kid, then, yeah, maybe you can do it. I don’t know. We’re about to have our 5th kid. And so that’s my thought process of, like, a a mistake to avoid is let’s say you can get a bigger family involved to be able to all go in on, like, a 30 to 60 or more piece of property.
And you have, you know, like, 3 bigger families that that can all go in. Whether everybody lives on or not, maybe 2 of them, maybe you live on it and your other two family members, they just buy as an investment property. What that does is that lowers your cost per acre. The price per acre goes down as you get a bigger piece of property. So on on one acre, I mean, you might be paying 20, you know, 25, $30,000 for 1 acre.
But if as you get to 5 acres, that might go down to, let’s say, I don’t know, like, 15 to 20. And as you get ten, it goes down even more. And as you get more, it goes down even more. Like, if you can get to a 100 acres, then the cost per acre is way less. Now, of course, you’re gonna be paying, like, $1,000,000 for a 100 acres right now on, like, good farmland, which is crazy.
Just make sure that it’s not just for right now in 2023 or 2024, whenever you’re gonna be buying a piece of property, but it’s for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Think of your family. Think of your kids. Can this property put multiple houses on? That’s my thought.
I think we we can definitely do it in 7 and a half acres, but for 5 kids that live on here, it’s gonna get kinda tight. It’s just it’s gonna be a little a little suburban area to be able to do that. So that’s a mistake is don’t buy too small of a property. And also, on the same topic about not buying land that’s too small, one other thing to think about with that is the bigger the land that you have, the further away you can be to neighbors. And, you know, sometimes neighbors change. The more acreage you have, the bigger the buffer you have. Okay. We are on to the next one.
Number 4
The 4th mistake to avoid when buying raw land for your homestead is hiring the wrong realtor. So here we are in my 2 acre forest.
We we have a lot of woods here, and so we luckily did not make this mistake. We have a great realtor that who specializes in, farm, homesteading, rec land. It was everything that we wanted to do with property. Now, unfortunately, we had friends who kind of did make this mistake, and that’s why I think of it. They hired a realtor.
It was a friend of theirs from church, and there was like that, you know, that relationship there of of a friendship, of a of a church relationship. That they they wanted to be nice and allow her to be the realtor. Y’all we went to go look at property with them. And this lady came to, like, a wooded area like this, a piece of property. And she was, like, wearing high heels and just a fancy clothes of, like, a normal suburban realtor would wear.
Like I’m not doing that. I’m not going in there. And so we went and we got our boots on and we went deep into the forest and they didn’t buy that property. They ended up buying a different property. But really, it was not the best for what they wanted to do.
They kinda just focused on the house and really just things did not work out. And so that’s what I mean in terms of if you get the wrong realtor, they’re not gonna know if a piece of property can do what you actually want it to do. Here’s a tip on how to find a good realtor. Find the county, the area that you are probably going to like to buy in. You wanna find a realtor that is listing a whole lot of properties in that county, in that area that you’re looking for.
There’s a reason why they’re listing all of those properties. It’s because they’re experts, and they know everybody. They will be able to help you find what you want. So take that realtor and hire them. Okay.
Y’all have a little background here with my ducks and these little pocket ponds that we’re creating for them.
Number 5
This leads us to number 5, which is a fast one. It is inspect any ponds. Not every raw land is gonna have ponds on it. But if there is a pond, then my suggestion to you is to find a way to inspect it.
How you can do that is you can either hire an expert that can be able to do a pond inspection. If you have the option to be able to see the pond, see the property on some of the extreme weather seasons. So down here in the south, if you can see it in the hot summer, or if you are up north in the cold winter. Oh, little fighting or a little mating. I do not I do not know what is happening over there.
So the reason for that is if you are up north, you might wanna see if the pond is gonna freeze. If you’re down south, which is for us and the the mistake that we made is we didn’t do this, is we found out that our pond in the back of our property, it goes dry because every single year we have a drought here. It doesn’t rain for like 6 to sometimes 9 weeks, which means that about 2 months, our pond is just a big old dry hole. And so for us, whenever we bought this property, we saw value in that pond, and it was a mistake that we made that we didn’t properly inspect it. Because I could have negotiated the property to be cheaper, because yes, there was value in thinking that you had a good quality pond, but really it wasn’t.
And that was a bummer because when we bought the property, we were so excited. We’re like, we bought land and it had water. Yes, sir. But in all reality, it didn’t.
Number 6
We’ve made it number 6, the last mistake. And we’re kind of in a a not so beautiful background, you know, looking at our electric panel here on our house. And that kinda leads us to the last one. Number 6. The last mistake to avoid when buying property for your homestead is not doing your due diligence and getting quotes for electric, water, and septic.
We did our due diligence, and we we did not make this mistake also. And we that’s how we knew. Whenever we did that 10 day option period, that is whenever I started getting quotes from all of these things. And that’s how I figured out that in order to get a well here on this property, it was gonna cost us $22,000 because they had to dig 900 feet down. I will make 800 feet.
Which nope. That’s why here on our main county road, we have a coop water because everybody knew that, hey. This is a a market because it’s very hard to get a well in this location so they can be able to service and they can make money. So for us, we knew that it was gonna be a $4,000 meter to install versus $22,000 for a well. But we did get all the quotes.
We also have a co op electric. They said that, hey. If we sign up for the electric and we’re able to finish our home within a certain amount of months, we actually were able to get a rebate on this. So that was super cool that we could get a rebate by doing this to where it helped offset some of our costs. It helps us feel like, hey, there’s a little bit of a pad there whenever we’re trying to sign up for all of this.
So do not make that mistake of not knowing what these utilities are gonna cost because they’re going to be expensive. Alrighty. It’s cold outside, and so I had to come in here in the shed to studio, but I do have one bonus that I wanna be able to tell you about. It’s not exactly a mistake to avoid before you buy your raw land for your homestead, but it’s something that once you buy it, you really wanna do this, and that is slow down. So I know that today in 2024, what I’m talking about is don’t wait too long.
Don’t buy a property that’s too big, like, all these things to be ready to act. Yes. Land inventory is crazy, and so you might have to make a sort of fast decision once you get your finances in order. But what I’m saying is once you actually buy the property, it’s yours. You own it.
That’s when you can breathe and you can slow down. You have the property. Don’t just start putting in a road. Don’t start, you know, doing your waterline. Definitely don’t start building a house there.
Once you have your property, you need to turn to the first principle of permaculture, which is observe and interact. Now, maybe you can’t fully slow down, and maybe if you bought it with land with a house on it, that you have to live there to where you’re having to sell your previous home or move out of an apartment to be able to get on the land. What I’m suggesting is don’t build a house right away. Don’t start running all of your utilities right away. It might be a good idea to, like, buy an RV or maybe a small shed house like we have or something like that to where you’re not putting all the rest of your capital in to the property that where you can slow down.
What I mean by that is you are going to make mistakes if you go fast with developing your property that you wouldn’t have made if you were able to observe and interact. So for here, that’s what we were able to do because we our property is 2 hours away from where we lived in suburbia. So what we were able to do was slow down. If we had 3 years, 2015 to 2018, that we could really study the property. We would be able to study what the water does whenever rain would come.
So when rain would come, like, how that water flows because you definitely don’t want to be in a low part of your property, if it might, you know, flood there. And then you might not want to be at the top point of the property because then you’re losing what you can do with gravity fed water systems, like rain tanks and stuff like that. So there’s all of these things that you’re really gonna learn on your land if you’re able to observe it and really interact with it. So you want to be able to take long walks on your property to really study it and figure it out. You want to be able to have time to get professionals to come there and give you their opinions because they’ve done this before, maybe you have it.
So that is the important step that once you buy your property, slow down, observe, and interact. So to conclude, what did I miss? What are some of the things that you think that you need to avoid when buying raw land?
Buying raw land, developing raw land to a homestead, having a shed to house, tiny house, debt free living. Alright. Hope you check it out.