EP49:How you can find potential homestead land hidden from real estate agents

well hello everybody welcome to another episode here at red tool-house in today's episode I want to talk about how to find the ideal piece of land to start your homestead not using the methods you'd think so let's get into it [Music] all right so let me explain what I just said there in the intro if you want to homestead but you haven't found that perfect piece of land yet maybe you're you're renting land from somebody and you're dabbling in homesteading maybe you're still hanging out in an apartment maybe you're living downtown but you know you want to get out you're just trying to find that perfect piece of land but you're not flush with cash you don't have the you know tons of money or your pockets aren't bulging with money of course to go buy land whose are any more land obviously has gotten really expensive so what's the normal way people look for land well of course the first thing you do is you go to the MLS you go to the realtor site Zillow those places and you look okay is there large tracts of land available that's somebody selling and what's the cost per acre well if you look at those situations a lot of Realtors really don't mess with bulk land or raw land they really like to deal with you nice houses that are on small postage stamp Lots it's easier to close it's easier to do title searches it's easier to get through these things get them in get them out get my commission off of that and move on so so it's hard to find these large property listings anyway with Realtors then you may find some real estate agents that specialize in that but even if you do find some specialization Realtors that handle a vacant land or larger tracts of land with maybe a dwelling or no dwelling on it what are you going to end up with what you end up with the fact that they know property value they know estimates and of course they are representing the seller you are the buyer they're representing the seller so they want to make sure the seller gets the maximum dollar out of that so of course you can cover the cost of commission and yeah the more I sell it for if I'm the realtor the more Commission I'm going to get because it's percentage based so in that situation if you're looking for land that is listed by a company it's already going to be marked up to the highest price possible that they think the market will bear what the what the average for that type of land would go for comparables options there so in that situation you're going to have to negotiate hard and heavy to get that price down to get the cost of that land down per acre and sometimes that's effective sometimes it's not so what's my big fancy-pants plan you may be asking well it actually involves looking for property through tax maps so let me explain this real quickly because this could get boring pretty quick if I let this drone on a lot of states now in the United States have their tax map data online so you can go to a website for the county of a specific state I live in a county called blinkin County in West Virginia Lincoln County has their tax data available online you can look it up and you can see the tax map if you've if you've ever pulled your title or if you're familiar with tax map it's basically just this rough outline of the boundary of your property that is tied to your property taxes and it's not an accurate survey it's not something you can say okay this is exactly where our property boundary is but it's just a loose representation of the size and layout of that tract of land so if I would go pull up my land property for Lincoln County I would see roughly where my borders are well since the internet and things have revolutionized everything no longer do you have to just go down to the courthouse to pull that data and pull out these big map books and look at the quadrants and plots and all that now it's all online and some counties have even done an overlay with Google Earth so you can see that tax map laid down on top of a google satellite image so then you can see does it have trees on it does it have open pasture is there a paved road nearby is there you know a nuclear power station right beside it is there all kinds of other things that are gonna make me say you know I'm not sure I want this so what am i saying do well what you do is you get online and say yeah let's say I live in Lincoln County and I want to look for a property in a neighboring County you know Kanawha County or let's go even further across the state to something like Pocahontas County and I can say well you know I don't have the time to go up and drive around pocus in Pocahontas County and look at land that I think oh that's neat is that you is that 10 acres or is that 5,000 acres I have no idea but if I brought up that tax map data I could look at that with the satellite view and say Wow check that out that's that's attractive land that's a hundred hundred acres or two hundred acres you could figure out this that you want based upon that that date as it's laid out on the map so what does that mean does that mean that properties for sale no no it doesn't in fact you nine times out of ten it's probably not going to be for sale so you think of well man that's going to take forever to go through all this tax data and people may not sell their land why in the world would I waste the time well give you a couple short cut tips for this tip number one is when you bring up that tax map data again get a rough idea of that at that area let's say you in familiar with a certain town you want to look around it so obviously discount some of these areas that are real close to these urban centers because the lands going to be more expensive look at a logical distance you'd feel that you want to drive if you got to drive in daily for a job or if you got to drive in weekly or monthly to get supplies so looking at say okay well let's exclude these areas around these hotspots these urban centers because they're going to cost more so you can start to define these areas that you want to look at so that's tip number one tip number two is once you've identified this area start looking through there's tax maps a lot of this tax map data will give you the person's name and an address and so what you can do is look at that and say okay this person that owns this mr. Smith owns this hundred acres that I'm interested in twenty miles from this town is mr. Smith's address the same as that property so you can figure out a case mr. Smith living on this property in this house so if it is if it's the same address you know okay yeah that's the same then well okay mistress the chances of mr. Smith going to sell that are probably lower but what I what I encourage you to look for is to look for mr. Smith if he's an absentee land owner so let's say you're looking in Pocahontas County West Virginia and mr. Smith's address is Kissimmee Florida or Orlando or something like that you think okay mr. Smith lives in Florida but he's got property here and you'll see that all over the place a lot of people are absentee landowners so you think well mr. Smith probably doesn't come up to his property in Pocahontas County very often he's probably down in Florida where he's retired or he lives or whatever so that is a pretty good flag to say okay mr. Smith isn't there there's maybe a chance that he's just bored with the property inherited it I sick of paying property tax on it he didn't even know what he has maybe he's ready to wash his hands of it so tip number three then is so using our same scenario that mr. Smith that lives in Orlando and he has property up here in West Virginia take mr. Smith's address down and hand write him a letter and I and I stress handwriting simply because that gets people to open it up if they see an envelope that's gotta stuff a printed label on it and it's just a white envelope thing goes just another piece of junk mail they're gonna toss it but if they see a handwritten address mr. Smith one two three Main Street Orlando Florida it's handwritten it's got a stamp and it's got your handwritten return address on it there's a chance mr. Smith's gonna open that a lot sooner than he'd open something that's your machine addressed tip number four is in that letter don't just say hey mr. Smith I was snooping on tax data and realized you don't live on this land you need to sell it to me obviously you're gonna get more flies with honey than you are with vinegar what you can do in that letter is just simply say hey here's what I plan to do with it if you would be willing to sell this property I would like to buy it from you and I would like to homestead on it I want to do this I want to improve their land I want to do all the things that you want to do that are positive to that property and maybe mr. Smith says yeah that was my grandfather's property and I've really been thinking about selling it but I just hate to see anybody get it and develop it into whatever and I think wow this person's taking the time to hand write me a letter and ask me if I want to sell my property and they're also telling me what they plan to do with it and I think that's in line with what my family would have wanted my grandpa would wanted so yeah I'm gonna reach back out to this person so you might be thinking Troy that's really a long shot how many letters am I gonna have to write before somebody even returns my message gives me a call or sends me an email and tells me to go fly kite much less a very even hear from anybody well you're right it could take a lot but it also takes a lot to find the perfect piece of land you spend a lot of time if you're searching for Homestead land you take a lot of time already so just add this think this is another arrow to add to the quiver of your of your tools and finding the the right homestead property for yourself so yeah you may have to write 50 letters you may have to write a hundred letters but just think about it if you find the ideal piece of property that's not listed on a realtor is not listed with any agent and is your private contacting someone you say hey man I'll give you $50,000 for that 100 acres they may be like wow I'm not doing anything with it I'm sick of paying property tax I think people are squatting on it anyway or people are dumping garbage on it I don't I can't get up there to look at it okay yeah let's start this conversation let's buy this now you're still going to obviously have to have the protections in place so when you buy it if you work out a deal to buy this land you're still gonna want to make sure you've got a lawyer involved to do the title search to do the closing you're going to have those closing costs but you could really offset a lot of expense if the property hasn't been listed at the highest possible evaluation nor is a realtor involved where commission and those things have to change hands so you may be able to work out a deal person-to-person and then only hire lawyers and those things to get involved during closing to do the title search to do the inspections all the things that you want to do to safeguard yourself so that's my advice to you as to how to get land cheaper than looking on realtor listings in public listings that way find a state or county that you're interested in living or you're interested in homesteading see if they have that data available online some services may even charge you you know one-time fee to get access to it determine if that's worth paying that fee but being able to look at that data online with satellite overlay to see exactly what it is get their address information be able to reach out to them there's a very handy way to make contact with people that may not even be considering selling their property until you prompt them the land I'm standing on now the hundred acres that we bought for fifty five thousand and then we sold thirty five thousand dollars worth of timber off of go back to episode 22 and you'll see you'll hear our story as to how we explained the process we went through but this property was not listed it was not on the market it was not advertised we just drove around and found it and then I started doing research about this land and realized okay this lands in pretty bad shape nobody's living on it I bet you somebody wants to get rid of it if they could turn it into cash so we were able to find the person that owned it reached out to them and worked out a deal no real estate agent involved so I didn't have to pay any Commission's I didn't have to pay an exorbitant amount for the property and I got this property net with the timber sale I got this property net 200 dollars an acre with 5500 and $50 an acre upfront investment and recoup the majority of that with a timber so it's possible to do it may not be the easiest thing to do but it's very possible to do and I encourage you to check it out just get access to the Internet and start looking around good luck

Channel: Red Tool House - Homestead

Views: 390,094

Keywords: homesteading, homestead, farming, pastured pork, self-reliant living, how to homestead, finding land, homestead land, land search, how to find land cheap, how to homestead land, finding land to build your own home, finding land for homesteading, finding land for a tiny house, finding land for sale, homestead land for sale, how to find cheap land for sale

Id: 67-M3slkJ18

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017