BUYING Land? - 7 Things to Know Before Starting

hi we're Sarah and Ryan Kaufman from one foot off the grid and today we're gonna give you seven tips that you need to know before you buy a piece of land we bought our five acre piece of land seven years ago and we're super happy with it however when we purchased it we didn't have all of the information and there's a lot of things we wish we would have known to ask before we started doing our research we promise that after watching this video you're gonna feel way more comfortable buying your own piece of land than we were seven years ago tip number one make sure to go and visit your land on site to get a feel for the terrain sometimes this can be hard because it requires traveling but it's really an important aspect of understanding what's useable on on your land for example on our property there was a huge amount of area that was sloped so our five acres piece of property is only has about two to two and a half acres of usable land what you can do if you're in the kind of pre diligent stage you can use Google Earth and that's really helpful to use they're trained tool and make sure to download the app to your desktop and you can go in and you can get a good feel for what the Train is like before you have a chance to visit on site and like Ryan said make sure that you really know what's gonna be usable on your property so we have a five acre piece of property but really only about two and a half acres of it is actually usable but this is actually really nice for us because it's right in the center and it gives us a really nice setback from our neighbors and gives us the privacy that we want out of our piece of property tip number two make sure you know about the maintenance that's going to come along with your piece of property we went into this kind of being like this is great it's a piece of property it'll take care of itself it's the forest the forest knows what to do no unfortunately the forest will take over every area that you really want if you don't maintain it so we actually have a culvert that runs under our road that leads up to our property and it's an - what kind of leaves that fall and a ton of leaves that fall into it so we didn't quite understand that we needed to keep that clear we've never had anything happen because luckily we had a neighbor tell us hey make sure you're maintaining that so now every year we know we need to maintain the Creek that runs through our property and make sure it's not getting clogged with a bunch of leaves so that our road to our property is there when we need it and then another thing that's huge where we are which might not be in your area is blackberries and they take over everything they're great to eat in the summertime but they're just a total weed and they take over everything so that's something we've had to learn how to basically eradicate we just get rid of down or maintain so we still have one picking patch in the summer time so and then we also have a small view of water view on our piece of property and we want to maintain that and that's been a lot more of a hassle than we thought and Ryan has to do a lot of chain sawing but I guess along with that you've learned a lot of chainsaw tip number three access to your land is extremely important I mean if you can't get on on to your property then there's not a whole lot of value so there's a couple things to consider here is make sure you have an easement to access your actual piece of property that should be kind of primary importance if you're dealing with a bank they'll probably double check that for you also but also like on our piece of property there's a private road that leads up to our land and so there's a an association that we pay into every year that maintains that road every year every other year and one thing to consider is if it is a private road make sure that there's an association in place because it could cause trouble in the future if you want to get a mortgage on the on your house a lot of banks won't won't lend on a piece of piece of property or a house unless there is a road road maintenance agreement so that's something to check we didn't really we knew there was one there but we didn't really understand what they importance well if it was so hopefully that tip helps you and you're looking for your piece of land tip number four know what utilities are already on your property and if you can get cell service at your property you need up know about cell service because if it's something that you want up at your properties sometimes if you're far enough out in the country there's not a place for it so you need to figure out if you have it there if it's a need for you if it's something that you don't need on your land obviously you don't need to worry about it if you don't get cell service when you're out there checking the property then just check in with your neighbors because sometimes you may have one carrier and your neighbors have a different carrier that will work for you instead so that's an easy fix the other thing is all of the utilities you need to know what's on your property already and if there's nothing on your property when we bought ours there were no utilities in place and we didn't really consider the cost of putting in your electrical and your well and your septic so that's something that you need to check in about like how much is it actually gonna cost if you don't have those utilities in place the the major considerations are going to be water electrical and septic so for your water you a really good tip is you can check your well logs which are usually public records for your county and you can see what your neighbors have had to drill down to four to get water and so that'll give you a pretty good idea of what level you're going to have to go to to hit water as well in on our piece of property we had to go down 278 feet and that's actually a little bit less than what they kind of anticipated at about 300 but was consistent with what our neighbors were so we were able to have a pretty good estimate of what that was gonna cost us before we agreed to start the drilling of course there's always those outlier cases I think one of our neighbors they they were gonna they expected that they were going to hit water at about 200 feet and ended up going to 300 so that pretty much increases the estimated cost by 1/3 so it's good to have an idea of what your expectation is but it's not a guarantee the other thing to consider is septic and septic is usually there's three main systems that we had explored the first one is a gravity system the second one is a pressure system and then the third one that we looked at was a mound system and it all depends on when the septic engineers come out and they they're going to do a test dig which they test like the percolation of the soil to see they've run their calculations and see what system is best in our case we were right on the line and I County they don't really allow gravity systems and it seems like that's what more more and more counties are not allowing gravity systems anymore so you'll have to check with your your utilities but the most we were on the fence between a pressure system and a grass and a amount cyst and a mound system is kind of like what it sounds a big mound that sits up on top of the of your property so it it gets in the way for a couple reasons now you have something in your way and it kind of is an eyesore and it also costs about twice as much as a pressure system so in our case we were just law on the line like I said but we were able to get approval for a pressure system and that worked that worked out really really well for us the last thing is electrical of course and electrical you'll want to talk to your local PD in our case we had the kind of funny story we we I talked to the PUD and they gave me a quote told me how what the first step was gonna be and I said okay so I submitted the application with my two hundred dollars or something it was and I was kind of surprised that like hey that was I thought it was gonna be a lot more expensive than that well it turned out the two hundred dollars was just for their engineer to come out and find the best route to run the electrical and kind of scope out the service and then the that was for them to basically give us a bid and so our bid ended up being about fifty five hundred dollars and that was we had to put the trench in before they got there which was an extra three or four hundred dollars as well so in our case I was I was off by a factor of I don't even know what hundred is that what yeah I was off by a lot but but anyway we got we got that we got that taken care of so make sure you talk with your utilities electrical septic and your your well drillers those are going to be some major considerations and what it cost to get the utilities the other thing is we didn't really talk about but internet so on on our upon our piece of property they had just ran two years ago they ran fiber up our road otherwise we would have been kind of stuck in a dial-up or satellite or mobile situation so luckily we were able to get high-speed Internet up there now which you know is kind of a luxury there's especially out in a lot of rural areas there's you know you don't have the luxury of high-speed Internet so that's a very important thing especially my wife and I work from home so having an access to high-speed Internet was super important for us just to add on that again it's just kind of you can put in all your utilities or as slow or as fast as you want to so if you're in the case where we were we knew we were gonna buy the piece of property and not being a huge hurry to do anything so we've been able to slowly save each save money for each piece of utility as we've gone along but if that's not the case and you're ready to build right away you really need to take it into consideration because all of this really racks up a high price tag pretty fast yeah and it was important for us to pay for as much as we could with cash and so we we took it slowly because it was kind of a long-term project for us if you are looking to build right away then you'll have to start exploring construction loans to be able to finance that and roll it into your your construction project tip number five what can you actually build on your land what are youse owned for this is something I don't really even think we checked on this but mainly because we knew there were people living on this road and they had houses so we were kind of like that's all good but one thing we did find out is no manufactured homes are allowed on the on this road that has all these pieces of property that didn't affect us too much but that may be something that you're looking into so make sure you know about that we did know we were gonna have a trailer put up at our on our piece of property for a little while so make sure if you're gonna do that that you can actually have a trailer up there that you can live in or even just have permit as a permanent structure on your land even though it's not and if you're looking at building a tiny house that's something to look at - because tiny house is probably considered a trailer since its movable so make sure that that is something allowed in your area and then last would be farm animals if you think that you're gonna do any farm animals any possibility of that in the future make sure that's something that is allowed on your piece of property some places are not zoned for agricultural agricultural needs that how you say that zoning zoning so make sure that you actually know if that's allowed because otherwise you may be there and you may get your house all built and be so excited to get your chickens and your goats and all that stuff and then none of its allowed so that would be a huge bummer one more thing to add is even when places are zoned for residential a lot of times you still are required to conduct a Geological Survey to make sure that the ground belief beneath your property is stable enough to build a foundation on and luckily when we had a pre inspection done and the county came back and told us that there wasn't a need for a Geological Survey but those can be very expensive if you are required to have one and even and sometimes they'll come back and say you know you can't build or you'll have to put hundreds of thousands of dollars in retaining walls and whatnot to be able to build on on a piece of properties so buyer beware tip number six is seller financing how are you gonna purchase your land you know banks are certainly an option to explore a lot of times if you even if you have good credit banks will only lend about 50% on on your property and then they want to see you building right away they want to have a construction loan go in and you need to be have a timeline to have an a' structure there because they want they want that turning into a house that they can have a lien on so that can be a challenge for a lot of people now how we purchased our land was we were we saw the piece of land we liked it and we talked with the the realtor and we had her talk with the the owner and we talked about seller financing and in our case we were able to purchase the piece of property for about 50% down and we the other 50% the seller for us at about 6% and we did that for a period we had three years of payments I don't 30-year amortization and then there was a balloon payment after the end of three years so at the end of that three years we had to pay what was left of our total payment on the piece of property yes yeah in our case we were able to get an extension for a couple years so we actually were able to make payments on it for five years and then make our balloon payment and so when you're talking about an amortization the it's as if we were paying the payments over fifteen or thirty year period of time so that's what like that's what those those payments would have been every year if we had 30 years to pay it off then you have to pay a balloon payment makes all the rest of the the rest that is due due at the end when that balloon payment starts so and that's the thing too if you are like I'm not a numbers person and Ryan is so a lot of times as we were dealing with all this the realtor saying all that and Ryan's going back and forth and I didn't understand any of it so make sure to that if you're part of a partnership that's going into this together make sure you really know the other side even if it's super boring t who we laugh because it's super boring to me and it just make it be explained over and over because I needed to know that in three years we were gonna need a big sum of money to be able to pay that a final payment so I kind of knew it was coming Ryan knew it was coming and we were ready for that so tip number seven check comps now what does that actually mean it means check the other pieces of property that are around or near you and see what they sold for and also know did they have utilities and you don't have utilities because that's something to factor into on the total selling price another point is ultimately you're responsible for knowing that information realtor's can be a great resource unfortunately in our case we relied on the information that the realtor's gave us on comps in the area and only after we closed did we realized that there was a really great comp that had only sold a year before which was the law right below us and it's sold for about the same price that we paid for ours except for it already had electricity pre ran which is five to six thousand dollars worth of value so if we would have had that information we probably could negotiate it a little bit better of a deal because we would have been armed with the the comp information so always double-check yourself or you know really press your realtor to make sure that they've done all the research for you so you have all the information to make the best decision and negotiate the best deal now you have seven things to keep in mind when you're out looking for your own piece of land we wish we would have had a video like this when we were looking because it would have helped us make not make as many mistakes and I think we were actually lucky because we went into a very little knowledge and everything turned out okay but it's really nice to have something like this in your pocket and have these little tips for you along the way and to those of you that have already bought a piece of land we'd love to hear what tips you want to add to this or what funny stories you may have had along the way maybe you didn't know something that you wish you would have it's always fun to start a dialogue below that people can check out too when they're doing their own research if this video was helpful make sure to LIKE and subscribe and make sure to click that little Bell icon that will give you notifications when we put out new new videos 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Views: 80,980

Rating: 4.9676051 out of 5

Keywords: buying land, purchasing land, land buying, land investing, things to know beforebuying land, one foot off the grid, things to consider when buying land, how to buy land, land buying tips, how to buy land and build a house, real estate, homestead

Id: fklsjma0N_A

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019