How to THOROUGHLY research land without ever stepping foot there

 

So, you want to look at land…

Usually for me the first step is Zillow, or a similar MLS site.

If you have looked for bare property before, you probably already know. You rarely ever get a “real” address. It will say something like “0000 example road exampleton, WA 98000” or as below. This is because usually unimproved land does not have an address assigned yet. Most agents will lead you to the road it’s on or will be on once an address is assigned. Still, it can be a challenge to find and research from this.

Sometimes you get really lucky and they include a parcel number for you

In any case, the next part is pretty similar.

With either a road name and the acreage, or best case scenario, a parcel number, it is possible to find more information on this land. Go to the county tax parcel website. Type in your google search bar “______ county tax parcel search”

Once you find it, open the site, and find the search bar on the county site. Type in the road name or parcel number if you have it. Some sites will not help you out with automatic road name options and expect you to know what you’re looking for. Hard to do with a partial address. A trick I have found with these sites is you can use the % sign before the road name to conduct a “wild card” search. This will give you a list of all addresses on that road. Of course you are looking for an address that doesn’t exist yet so you will have to click on a random address, click on map, and search around the area that way. You may find the agent misspelled the road name so if it does not come up right away, try other spellings. We’re all human here.

The next part is the hard, tedious part. You will see a map with all the parcels there. If you are looking for a standard 5.0 acre parcel it may be hard to find. But most parcels are not exact whole numbers and this is very helpful in narrowing down your search. Also, the property here has a distinct bend to it which helps. Sometimes I just have to click on one, see how much acreage it has, and either look for larger or smaller parcels based on that. (I told you this part was tedious). Once again. If you can, get the parcel number from the listing or call the listing agent and ask.

But, if you find yourself with a particularly difficult listing and an agent that insists you have your agent talk to them or sign a contract.. you may need to know this information. I’ve been there. Any of those red boxes there are parcels with addresses on this road. Reminder that you are looking for something that does not have an address so I’d start with the larger chunks that are not red.

In any case, I picked one here for size comparison. I am looking for 8ish acres on this road. My next step is to click on Land and Location link

Here’s where that lead. Now I know to look for parcels about 4 times the size

Ok, skipping ahead. I used the approximate size and features of the land such as that very round corner along the road and found the parcel. But I made sure to check that the land matched up with the parcel size I was looking for and it all checks out. No situs address, same sweeping corner, same distance from the water, and same parcel size. In my case, same parcel number too. If you are so lucky to have that information

Now, the fun part begins. I highly recommend looking at the following before wasting your time hunting down a piece of land in person. Geology, water, critical areas, zoning, elevation. Also good to know and public information is when and for how much the land was last sold. This applies to homes, too. Now, things change obviously. If they bought after the 08 crash and before the climb, you are not likely to negotiate that much with them. But sometimes you find they just bought the property, have made no improvements as per the county records, and are asking 6 times what they paid. Sometimes, and not always, if it is listed a while and this is the case they may negotiate a bit. Or it may just turn you off from the deal completely. Either way, more information, right? There are also some good links to check out under details. It is also possible to find out is how much taxes are on this land, and if the tax payments are up to date. If taxes are late, this may be more of a motivated seller than the listing leads on.

Water Critical areas “Whaat R critical areas.”

Anyways… You want to see what kind of rivers, streams, and wetlands are on the land. In this particular PNW area, this is usually my first task. We have water all over and you can’t build a house over wetlands. Sometimes the whole property is a wetland, making it basically impossible to use for anything more than a place to visit and go for walks. (If that) This particular chunk of land has a stream of water that literally borders the whole property. Already it is unlikely you are going to be able to punch in a road without a little bridge and if it’s a stream with salmon, it’s a huge headache if even possible at all. This is great to know before you visit and fall in love with the scenery. If you are still interested in the land, this could be a potential bargaining opportunity knowing this information.

Ok, the following photo also shows “potential wetlands” meaning the area around the stream is probably a bit swampy and the county may come in and decide that its wetland. Maybe right after you buy it. Making that whole green area unbuildable.

 

The next thing to look into is Zoning. For many this maybe the first thig to look at, for me it’s the second as most 5 plus acre parcels are RR and you can typically build 1 house on these which is what I’ve looked for in the past. Ok, so to figure out zoning, on your layer list theme here, I’m going to click on zoning

Awesome, right? Hehe.. OK, so the green with the giant “RR” is not for railroad. It means “rural residential.” And it basically means you can put up to one house per 5 acres typically. How do I know? That handy dandy legend there on the side. You will see things like “1 DU per 5 ac” which means “1 Dwelling Unit per 5 acres” or you can see “1 DU per 10 ac” which would not work in this case since it is less than 10 acres. Good stuff to know.

 

Next thing I typically look at is if this land is a cliff, ravine, etc. It’s not always easy to build a house on land that resembles a rollercoaster. So from my layer list, I’m going to click on the general features theme and make sure I click on “Contours”

Now from the legend on the side I can see what the lines represent. Gives me some idea of how hilly it is.

Ok, there is also the option of seeing what kind of utilities are nearby. Not sure if this was available when I was property searching but here you can see there are a couple culverts nearby. Nothing else popped up. There are neighbors with houses though so utilities are probably close, at least power. Water and septic are often not available on bare larger parcels of land. If they are, some info is probably on the county records section.

 

Next is Geological hazards area. Yikes. I noticed that the legend for this was not quite right so I removed some of the hazard categories to see what was what. This is all of them together. It appears that the orange is seismic high hazard area

The red just under the orange appears to be Landslide hazard area.

And the purple is Erosion Hazard areas

If all of that is not enough to scare you off and you want to go see this place in person… you can use the map measuring option to draw lines along the road and figure out how far it is from a landmark, the nearest house, etc.

 

 

Last but not least, Play around with the site. There are so many things you can find out about land on these county sites and its nice to have an idea of what you are getting yourself into before writing your first offer.

 

How we bought 40 acres and an old house with creative financing

 

My husband, 2 kids, and my pregnant self set out on finding 10 acres after selling our last home. We had been searching for about 9 months doing a month-to-month rent situation with a neighbor of our last home. We had lost that house due to fire(Read our story here) and decided to rebuild as the market had changed. In the process we lived in a park model trailer for about 18 months. (Read my tips on RVing it here!)

I forget exactly what our budget was at the time. We had some money from the sale of our house and some left from our insurance claim. Initially, I wanted to buy the land outright, live in the RV and figure out the rest later. That was, until I found 40 acres with water and power. They were asking 295K and it stated in the listing that it would have to be a cash-only sale. We definitely didn’t have that much. I think about half.

The first visit.. The first time we went to check out this land was just on our own. We traveled through about a mile of forest and fell in love with the drive. We got to an orange gate at which point we decided not to go without our realtor. After we got her to come out, we got to open the gate and go about another 800 feet where we saw a lot of brush, a bunch of out buildings that were in various forms of disrepair, and including a 2 story house. 

 

It was clear that the former owners had dwelled in this home at some point. Instead of typical appliances though, they had a wood burning cookstove and wood heating stove. I instantly respected the resilience of these people.

 We came to find out later it was an older couple who had both passed away. It took the family a couple years to clean but they left a piano. I have had many friends say they thought it was haunted. Cobwebs everywhere, grapevines and blackberries taking over the house, crawling into the windows, and it hadn’t been updated since it was built (they think in the 50s but no records to indicate for sure). Upstairs was even more wild with various rooms started but not finished, windows leading to neighboring rooms, built in desks in random places, and ladders going up to the attic. It definitely had an eerie vibe to it. Cool, but super weird. You couldn’t do more that park, back up, and leave. It was overgrown EVERYWHERE. For us looking for a bare 10 acres, this 40 acres with a house in the middle and some utilities was better than we could have imagined. At the time, the housing market was pretty crazy so it seemed like a good deal. It felt like you were in the middle of nowhere but town was only 7 minutes away. 5 of those minutes was just getting out of the driveway. It was closer to town than we had ever been and felt a seclusion like no other. We were very interested.

How do you finance 40 acres and a haunted house? We quickly found out that it was no easy task to finance this property. But the title doesn’t say “How we almost got 40 acres and a haunted house” now, does it?

The first offer..

I made my cute little attempt at buying half of the land. There were 4 parcels as part of the sale. I knew I could buy half of it without financing. Alas, it was a no go. They wanted all of it sold together.

I looked into getting a home loan. As you can imagine though, this home was not going to pass inspection for a typical home loan.

So I got more creative. I looked into a rehab loan. And while there was definitely a house in need of repair, that particular house sat on 15 acres and because the property would always outweigh the value of the land no matter what we did to it, this was not an option.

I looked into getting a land loan. But because there was a house or structure on the property, it disqualified for a land loan even though the house was not exactly what most people would call “livable”. Rats.

Divide and conquer. I used the fact that we did have some money, and some of the land could technically qualify as bare land because the house was on a different parcel to my advantage. I made an offer contingent on bank approval that we would buy all the land. We would pay 80k in cash for the house and 15 acres. We would get a land loan for the remaining 25 acres. We would sign a contract that made both sales contingent on one another and that we had to buy all the land in the same signing session. They accepted the offer.

Now came the hard part. The bank. The first bank we were talking to worked with us but in the end, they didn’t like the fact that we were getting 15 acres and a house for 80k and paying 215 for 25 acres with nothing. They were assuming more risk than we were.

I thought we were done. But somehow, I got connected with Northwest Farm Credit Services. I ran it by them, showed that other parcels near us were selling for 20k an acre for a 10 acre parcel and we were getting it for 8.6k an acre. It would absolutely be able to sell again for more in the event that we were to default on the loan. Why was the land so cheap? Because the seller didn’t want to divvy up the sales and thought that someone would have to pay all cash. Or because they wanted it gone. Either way, it was being sold at a discount. Maybe the ghosts, I’m not sure. They haven’t bothered us much.

In the end, the bank agreed to the deal. They were able to work with our outside of the box thinking and they granted us our loan with 20% down at 6.75 interest. We signed one pile of papers paying cash for the 15 acres, then immediately signed a much lengthier package due to the loan paperwork. I remember that amazing day so well. Even now as we struggle to get our doublewide done and get out of this park model, I am so grateful that we were able to make it work and buy this land.