Tonseth - Buying Country Land

By Peggy Tonseth

So, you want to move to the country? Give up dirty air, noise, and congestion? You want to live the good life, you say. Grow your own food. Be self-sufficient. Good. Do it.

But before you do, know what you are getting into. Learn which of your dreams you can fulfill easily, which will require time and money. And then, go for it.

This bulletin will guide you through part of your exploration: looking for and deciding which country property to buy. It will tell you how to find the pieces of land to look at in the first place, and then what to look for once you are there. It will point out specific factors that will be important to you later and explain why.

First, lets start with you and what you want to do with your country property.

The kind of land you look for will be determined by what you intend to make of it. Your requirements will be very different if you are planning to live in town and vacation on your land than if you plan to homestead. Do you want a vacation home with good fishing? Then buy land near bodies of water. Are you a hunter? Then you will want to be near good woodland. If you want to homestead, you will need tillable land, a woodlot, and, probably, pasture land.

Some people buy land with several uses in mind. They may want to vacation on it now and retire to farm it later. My husband, John, and I bought a cape and sixty isolated acres in Vermont for exactly that reason. There was neither plumbing nor electricity. The road was impassable three months of the year. Perfect for vacationing, we thought, and it was a nice investment against inflation. We believed we might move there in the distant future; but less than a year after signing the papers, we decided to move to the farm.

Before we could get started with the real project of gardening and farming, we needed to make buildings livable and get a good source of water. The impassability of the town road for three months of each year from our house and the one-and-a-half miles to our nearest neighbors was an attractive feature of privacy in the vacation property days, but the isolation became a burden when we lived there year-round. We lugged our groceries and laundry in, and we trudged out to jobs that were necessary to finance improvements on the farm.

You get the picture, Im sure. If we had thought carefully about how we would use our property, what the drawbacks and advantages were, we might have looked for another piece of land, or we might have chosen to do just as we did. But we would have had a better idea of what we were getting into, and we might have looked at some obstacles as challenges rather than as discouraging problems.

Here are a few things for you to think about, before you start looking for land. How important are neighbors to you? While it is romantic to visualize yourself independently facing the elements, away from everyone, private, quiet, and alone, these things can have their harsh sides in times of emergency, especially for older people and those who live alone. Also consider the distance to a general store and to a decent hospital. Each is vital in its own way.

If you have children or are anticipating them, consider schools and facilities for child care. Dont look just at the quality, but also check out things like distance to travel, costs, and opportunities for outside activities for the children.

Transportation is an item to think about for everyone living in the country. Rarely will you find any form of public transportation. People who commute to work or transport marketable items must think about the effect gasoline shortages and increased prices will have. For the family depending on the farm income to live, the gasoline issue will be among the very serious ones.

Some rural areas do not have the services that most of us take for granted: water and sewage disposal, for instance, and trash collection. Ask at the town or county clerks office about road maintenance to make sure that the property you are looking at is on a maintained road.

There are places that have no electricity or telephone lines. Can you afford to extend these lines? In most places, the telephone company and the power company work together to install their lines. You will want to ask both companies what the current procedure and prices are.

Finally, be sure to look at the property in different seasons. Land features which are apparent at one time of year may be hidden or very different at another time. For example, in the spring, there may be plenty of water to use for farming and building a pond; but by August, it may have dried up, no available water at all.

Begin your search by visiting the area you have chosen to move to, subscribing to local newspapers, and getting in touch with several real estate people.

The real estate advertisements in the local papers will give you introductory information, what price ranges to consider, and where land is available. In addition, you can find legal notices of properties to be sold for delinquent taxes, mortgage foreclosures, and estate settlements (more about these later). The real asset in having the local paper is in learning about the area in which you plan to make a large investment.

If you have decided to use a real estate agent, begin by contacting several of them. Tell them what you are looking for and see how they react to you. If you do end up purchasing land through an agent, you will want to know that person well enough to understand his or her idiosyncrasies.

After trying a few agents, you can decide how you will interact with the real estate people. Some buyers choose the agent they like most and stick loyally to him or her. There are some advantages to this. One broker told me that if a customer is looking exclusively with her, she works harder, knowing that she will have a sale, that it is only a question of her finding the right property. She begins to build up a relationship with the customer, challenging herself to find the right property. She throws herself into the project as though it were her own.

The other side of the coin is that some agents will become complacent knowing that you are their client only. These brokers will work harder for you if there is the element of competition with others who have property listings in the same area.

Keep in mind that you need pay nothing to be shown property. Real estate dealers have many services for you the buyer, but their money comes from the seller. They may make you feel that they have your interests at heart, and because you are the prospect with the money, perhaps they do; legally they represent the sellers. This may seem like a minor point, but it is worth remembering.

As you look at properties with the real estate agents, you should follow up on private sales advertisements as well. Find them in both local newspapers and magazines that specialize in country living, newspapers of nearby cities, and real estate advertisements.

When you see what you like, make an appointment; visit the property; walk the boundaries with the owners; talk to them about their experiences with the property. Any information you can get now will help you later.

If you become interested in the property, visit the neighbors and talk to local residents who might know something about the land. If you are very certain that you want to buy the property, retain the services of a good,