Before buying land, use Google Earth and the RULER TOOL

all right today I'm gonna show you how to use the ruler tool in Google Earth this is going to be a very important tool probably the first tool you should be using when you are researching your property that you want to purchase for say building a homestead or whatever you're gonna be doing with it you are gonna be given setbacks and requirements that will affect how you layout and plan your property build out or whatever projects you have the ruler tool is highly important even when select even before buying a piece of property and I'm gonna show you just real quickly what I'm talking about so back in the day I was looking for a piece of property in Virginia found some it was 20 acres and this is a perfect piece of property to show you the power of the ruler tool and it also showed me that this property would just wasn't gonna work for me and ultimately it was it was a correct it was a correct assumption so the property was on Pond Road in Buckingham Virginia that I didn't have an address because it was just parcels so another power of Google Earth over other mapping systems is the fact that you can scroll around the entire globe and find what you're looking for so this is where it takes me on Pond Road now this is not the property I was looking at and I had a survey in an image of what the survey looked like and my piece of property was a very distinct shape and I was able to find it really quickly because it was right I mean this is the shape and the property was divided into two the owner sold off half of it and the other half was still completely wooded completely raw and it was 20-something acres hey my wife and I said Oh 20 acres for $47,000 it was a great Buy sure we thought it was gonna be a great Buy I had some things on it that we were looking for some history stuff had water sources but that's a whole nother another topic real quickly can you tell if there's water on this property this is the property right here can you tell if there's water on here some of you can't some of you can but there is water there's actually two separate creeks on this property and you may not be able to tell that just by looking at this but that's a whole another video oh and by the way can you find the old hardwood trees on this property they're right here that's them but I can tell by looking at this what the older trees and stuff are and believe or not there's a hidden treasure under there that really made me want to buy this piece of property and anyway going forward we are going to look at the ruler tool so I was talking to the realtor and I asked you know about how far the power lines would be run what the setbacks were from for building for septic for the well and things like that and just a quick overview here's your ruler tool okay you can do paths you can do lines which are straight lines polygons which are obviously a shape paths allow you to draw multiple lines to get distances but we're gonna just do a line tool real quick and I have it set 4 feet but you can change this to miles yards whatever you want feet is gonna be what you're probably gonna use because most setbacks are you know based in feet so I knew my property was from basically here to here to here down to here up over and back again and we we didn't want to be so far off the road that we had to clear a road and pave it and you know snow and ice all that stuff kind of a problem to get and build over here because there's a house here there's a house here now just real quickly I want to see the distance from this house to here and it's 275 feet now that may be acceptable for some but we kind of wanted a little more seclusion so we were looking at building back here now we knew from the power line and let's the there's a power line like right over here you know let me go ahead and just pin that real quick and kind of mark that as a power line for future reference let's call it right there okay so we're gonna call that the power pole now I knew by talking the ruler 500 feet of line from this post would be free okay so let's go 500 feet from here which takes me to right in here okay so that's a 500 foot line so that means anywhere within this radius would be free power line run but see where that puts our house puts our house right in between these two houses and that's not my house but somebody else is building the house there but you can see they're kind of within and there's not much I mean some people say oh it's 200 feet well that's from here to there but if you go from here to there it's only 100 feet which by the way is another setback you have to be like 70 feet from the property border before you can build your house so 70 feet from here there's your setback okay now this is actually a pretty narrow piece so from the property line I think was right in here it's like 275 feet if I'm not mistaken okay cross with the trick is you got 275 feet your house has to be within 500 feet of the powerful free power run but now you have to worry about okay I have to be so far from my boundary on both sides okay so you've got your 70 feet there now what well your septic has to be a certain distance from the house but also a certain distance from the border of your property and so does your well your well has to be a certain distance from the house certain distance from the border but it also has to be a certain distance from your septic tank and it may have to be uphill it just depends on your county or your Township whatever the regulations Building Code is for your particular area so those are all different kinds of things to consider so you can always use Google Earth ruler and so let's say that this over here is power okay so let's clear this let's call this you know this the building zone for the septic okay so we can just type in yeah septic let's say we want to have a well let's say the wells gonna be in that area okay and then obviously we have our house well you know you can do from your power pole to the house which is under 500 feet so we can save that so we know that this one here is you know power let's say we need another one so we'll go back to the ruler and let's say we need septic to be you know 75 feet from the house okay well that's good good it needs to be 70 feet or whatever from the border okay well that's almost spot-on okay so we can add a line there we're not going to title it and then we can add another line so to the house okay so we can just save it we're just doing this real quick and the well has to be so many feet from that but it also has to be so many feet over a hundred feet from your septic oh my god look at that so we can add these just like so obviously label them so you can tell in the future what they are and you can basically layout we're not worried about this because this is over 100 feet away from that property line and looking at how they're building this it looks like this may be exactly what they're doing they could be putting the well over here and the septic over here they have a power over here actually there's the power pole right there is not far off and and this particular property there's actually a little cemetery up here in the bushes which has its own setbacks you have to build from but that was a little too cramped for space for us and looking at the property from an overhead point of view we knew that if we built all the way up here there's no way we were gonna be able to do any kind of farming or anything way back here it just wasn't economically feasible for us the person that bought the property here cleared all this out we can see that we can even see that they've cleared out back here and it looks like they've allowed some logging to go on back here which meant that there is going to be logging trucks and all kinds of stuff running through here so it's oh and look at all this logging that's been done so it's always a good thing to use Google Earth specifically right off the bat you got a basic layout of lines here that are specific so you know you can always come back and get the information from those measurements and add those lines okay so here's your measurements in feet seventy-five feet so you can always go back and look those up this is a very good tool to use when playing in your property I'll get into more details and stuff later on about elevations and all that but this is a very very basic tool as a must-have if you're looking to buy and build on some property anywhere in the world all right well if you have any questions please feel free to ask I hope you enjoyed this quick little video I tried making it as quick as possible there's just a lot of information to cover so I'm going to do a little series of these throughout and I'll eventually get you to my property and my build-out and how I'm calculating all that because I'll be more familiar with that than stuff that I've done in the past okay well I hope you enjoyed it like I said if you have any questions please feel free to shoot me an email all right good luck

Channel: Howling Farms

Views: 99,230

Rating: 4.6934867 out of 5

Keywords: google earth, ruler, buying, property, land, setbacks, encroachments, money

Id: AiEo-tIJVok

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016