Buying Land on E-Bay

What the Hell Were We Thinking? Land; like gold, a timeless piece of wealth that can change and be molded, but never destroyed. It has been what it is long before Humankind walked the earth, it will outlive all of its owners. It is sacred to some, it is valuable to everyone. The very word, ‘Land’, conjures up romantic passions. Unlike gold it can’t be stolen and hidden away. It evokes emotions and loyalties deeper than family. The lust for land is second only to religion for the cause of war. Stand here, on my land, and look in any direction. It might have an amazing view, it may be in the pit of a valley, it may be the side of a mountain, but its mine. Wind swept desert, purple sage rustling, silent fir covered, I own it. And in any direction there’s nothing on it, no building, no fences, no survey markers, maybe not even a road. It is untapped potential. Bare-Ass Naked Land. My wife and I backed into buying land on E-bay, victims of circumstance, really. Sure, we’ve always been in love with the idea of owning big hunks of land. One of the things Robin, my wife, has often talked about is a 5000 acre ranch, with the ranch house in the very middle of the property. Implied in all this is that no one could get on the property without our permission. She pictures everything being ordered over the Internet, and delivered to the locked entrance, put in a drop box of some kind, and us driving our golf carts or riding our horses down to pick up whatever UPS or FEDEX left. We’d have a garden big enough for all our fresh produce, and we’d run cattle, have pigs, chickens and whatever else it would take to feed our children. All these things would have to be cared for and maintained of course, critters with big brown eyes have to be slaughtered to get steaks out of them, but that’d be my problem, just as long as she didn’t have to hear about it. We’d home-school the kids. Best of all, she wouldn’t have to put up with people. God, she hates shopping. At some point, if you own enough land, you become sovereign, a nation unto yourself. Reality is, we’re wage slaves. Oh, sure we’ve tried to develop home businesses. Robin and her mom did the craft fair thing. We even tried worm farming. Did all right, too, until it came time to herd them to market. Nothing’s ever taken root. We’ve done nothing but develop hobbies. I had hopes my writing could be that home business. No joy. It didn’t happen. About a year and a half ago we re-financed our Southern California home and got a big hunk of equity to fix up our acre lot. Robin pictured a second story and professional landscaping. I was hoping for a nice fence around the front yard and a couple of sheds out back. Then the Cedar Fire hit. Living just below the little community of Crest, the Fire burned down to two houses above ours, as well as north and south of us. We were lucky, we still had our home. Half the people in Crest lost there’s. Unexpected consequences. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. Hundreds of homes need to be rebuilt. The construction industry went into high gear. Prices jumped. There’s still shortages of building materials and skilled labor, causing delays and frustration. The fire was a year ago, and as of this date, September 30th, 2004, most houses have not been rebuilt. If you’re a contractor with literally dozens of homeless families counting on you to get them out of rented apartments and trailers, are you going to waste time on someone’s home improvements? You might, for a price. So we were sitting on all this money, and we couldn’t spend it efficiently. It was going to dwindle away into things that we’d look at later as nothing more than added clutter. Robin found herself on e-bay, and there it was, ads for land. BEAUTIFUL ARIZONA LAND! 10 ACRE LOTS! Build! Camp! Near Beautiful Alamo Lake! Without a dollop of research, without even checking on Topozone, we bought. In fact, we bought twenty acres near Kingman, Arizona, the western part of the state, twenty acres near Woodruff, Eastern Arizona, and forty acres, in the northeast corner of Elko County, Nevada. Utah is within spitting distance. All of it sight unseen, all of it desert land. We are desert rats. I’ve written lots of articles for different sites on the web on our adventures; HikeTheWild.com, Explorehistoricalifornia.com, and quite a few articles for DesertUSA.com (Links at the Bottom). Up to this point, however, we’ve only visited. And in fact, for the foreseeable future we’re still going to visit the desert, but now we own small chunks of it, all over. So let’s get some things out of the way. Why are you looking to buy land? Like I said, we’re desert rats, for twenty years my wife and I have wandered the Anza-Borrego, Yuha and Joshua Tree deserts, and bit by bit, we’re being shut out. It comes in fits and starts, the Desert Protection bill shut down huge sections of places we used to explore, that I’ll never be able to share with my children, and then recently Oriflamme Canyon. We’ve camped there for years, always wondering if we were in the Cleveland National Forest or the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. We once ran into a local, a rare thing, and he informed us it was private property. “But don’t sweat it. The landowner doesn’t mind. It’s just a matter of being good guests.” Recently the State Park acquired it. I remember reading the San Diego Union’s article, talking about how yet another ‘private property incursion’ into the State Park had been expunged, and best of all, “the public will still be allowed to enter this Canyon”. Not drive in and camp of course, but hike in. Visit. So we’re buying land for two reasons; as an investment, with every intention of selling at least some of our purchases at a profit, and to have access to the places we hold dear to our hearts. You may be a desert rat as well, or an outdoorsman. You may be looking for a place to retire to, or get away to. You may be a speculator looking for an investment. Keep your goal in mind as we review some realities of buying raw real estate on line. If you go to E-Bay, you’ll see all sorts of land for sale, but scroll down to the cheap stuff, with lots of acreage and nothing else. Robin has checked out other sites on the ‘Net for buying and selling land, yet we seem to keep coming back to E-Bay Make no mistake about it, buying land like this is speculation, for whatever reason you’re buying, you’re risking your money as much as if you were buying pork bellies on the futures market. Except for one important thing, it doesn’t just disappear. As long as you pay your property taxes, you own the land. The vast number of sellers on E-Bay appear to be honest and forthright. They’re in it for the long haul. But they don’t volunteer information, and all of them have a qualifier somewhere in their ad, that boils down to ‘Buyer Beware’. Practice due diligence. Read the ad completely. Too often a reader’s eyes glaze over as they scroll through this small text. If you have to, run it off and read a hard copy. You’ll see a great price, then realize that it’s only a bid on the down payment. The price for the property is fixed. There was a forty-acre lot for sale in Wyoming that caught the wife’s eye, and it was going for cheap. But wait, the mineral rights were owned by a railroad company. If the railroad needed gravel, for instance, for its road bedding, they could conceivably come onto your property and start excavating. What about water rights? These are things you ask the seller. On the list of things it’ll say ‘Power: generator, solar, wind’. In other words, you’re not going to run power lines out to this lot anytime soon. You’re obliged to either run a generator, or do without. If utilities are anywhere nearby, the seller is going to tout it. ‘Water: Well or Tank’. Translation: there is no water. A famous Southwestern saying is; “Whiskey’s for drinkin’, Water’s for fightin’ over”. Look at the topography maps of Arizona, Nevada, Utah or New Mexico. In the backcountry where the land is for sale, there may be nothing else marked but the wells that have been drilled. They’re named, and they’re important places and parcels. If you own land with a well or natural spring, that property is very valuable. If you intend to drill a well, you’re in for a rude awakening. In many areas of the southwest, there’s a moratorium on well drilling. Where it is legal, there’s a layer of bureaucratic red tape that guarantees that its going to cost you around ten thousand dollars for one good well. What has become popular is tanks. When you’re there at your desert hide-away, you either bring water with you to put in a tank, or you have it delivered. The tank might be on top of the roof of your cabin or trailer, or it might be up the side of a hill, or on a tower, gravity feed. You have to check around for this, but there’s water delivery services in a lot of remote places. They charge, but it might be worth it. Then there’s the simplest of all realities, is there a road to your property? So far, all of our properties have roads either to them, or through them, although the dirt road to our land in Elko County is too rough for our thirty-four foot motor home to get back to, and it’s a twenty mile drive on that dirt road to it. (I have a special place in my heart for this lot of land. Its so far out, I have anxiety attacks.) Other people we know have not been as lucky. One gentleman bought two ten-acre lots in the same development we’re in, and there is simply no road to them. One lot is at the bottom of a canyon, and without four-wheel drive, an ATV or good legs, you’re not getting there. Access easements appear neatly on the plat map. The easements defy the topography of the land, straight lines around perfect ten -acre squares, when the land has hills and washes and roads that don’t appear on the section map. And without a survey, how do you know where that easement is? Usually this land has not been surveyed. While the lot’s rough edges are given, surveyed land is measured down to, in Nevada’s case, four inches. Without a survey you really can’t be sure where your property boundaries are. Using a topography program and a GPS, as well as onsite inspection, I can get it down, I think, to 12 feet, one way of the other. So far, with the help of neighbors, we’ve got one property on the way to being surveyed for about a thousand dollars. When its done, I’ll write up the details. Generally this land does not have title insurance. Makes sense. Who would loan money on a property worth only a couple thousand dollars? Still, this is one of those things where you’re taking a risk, that later on you might have to correct or regret. The gentleman we bought the western Arizona land contends that he knows where to look for liens against property. He does that on all the properties he’s interested in, thus doing what the title insurance is supposed to guarantee against. Here’s one of the things I’m going to try to investigate and see how he does this. Sounds like a future article, doesn’t it? If you can, go look at the property before you buy. Most people can’t do this, but if you do, you could be a whole lot more discerning about purchases. There’s something assumed in that statement though, isn’t there? How will you know the property when you see it. This is undeveloped land. There’s no sign saying its for sale, its not fenced. There might not be a road to it. The platte map tells you where you are in relation to other lots, to the development section, but, assuming you get direction that are clear enough to get you there, how do you know what’s yours, even roughly? You can order the 7.5 topography map of the area your new land is on from the USGS (United States Geologic Survey) which is for sale all over the internet, but my suggestion is to get the program TOPO! National Geographic. You get the version for the state you’re buying in, Arizona, for instance, and it includes maps from very generic, to 7.5 topography maps. TOPO! Allows you to zoom in four hundred per cent, which might seem extreme, until you’re trying to plot out a ten-acre lot in a square section with six hundred forty acres in it. There’s a program called Delorme, which is the absolute best program for mapping out trips, and having all sorts of great functions for travelling freeways, highways and roads, but for marking land and measuring distances on land, Topo! National Geographic is the best. The older, pre-National Geographic version of this program is for sale on E-Bay. I have that program as well, and while it was the best when it came out, it doesn’t have UTM coordinates, and you buy it by the county. I’ll write an article about things like UTM coordinates and why they’re better than Longitude and Latitude soon, especially if you’re using a hard copy map and a grid reader. You also want to get a handheld GPS unit. What I ended up doing, was transposing the Section Map onto the topo map, and then calculating the boundaries of my property, then punching those coordinates into the GPS. Like I said, I’m somewhere within 12 to 24 feet correct. (I intend to find out a whole lot more about the surveying side of this, ultimately codify what I do, then write an article about it.) All the numbers that come with your property mean something, and you can find it all on the topo map, you just have to know what you’re looking for. The next step is to get a laptop computer, and the wiring that allows you to connect your GPS to the computer and the TOPO! Program. I haven’t gone that route yet, but I’m working on it. We visited our land in Western Arizona and northeastern Nevada last June (’04). I ended up writing a road trip report (http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?id=14711). Since writing the article, I’ve received a lot of e-mail from people, who are all basically in the same game we’re in. If you’re in, you can contact me through the ‘Contact the Author’ thingy at the top of the article. Its so cumbersome,though,I can't imagine anybody putting up with it,so if you like, contact me at dmsftr.hotmail.com. Questions, comments, observations, all are welcome. I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert. In fact, I suspect that I’m so ignorant I don’t know what questions to ask. You can help me on this. As it stands right now, since purchasing the land in Western Arizona, roughly a year ago, properties in the same subdivision are selling for twice the price per acre that we paid. Meanwhile, we’ve been contacted by a buyer in Elko County, Nevada, who is excitedly offering to pay us, sight unseen, fifty dollars an acre for our land there. That’s roughly a third of the price we paid for it. We haven’t even investigated how to go about selling this land, on or off-line, but that hasn’t stopped us from buying. I don’t know if we’ve hit critical mass. The wife still has that lust in her eyes for more. ‘Land’ indeed breeds passion in both our hearts. We joke about having the next five year’s worth of vacations planned out, visiting our far-flung estates. Me, I want to document every plant, every cactus on every piece of land we got, know whether ringtails or kit foxes call our desert land home when we aren’t there. I want to sweep it with a metal detector, I want to research the history of the land and who was there before us, and the surrounding countryside around us. I want to grasp it and know it before I die and get planted in it, as it lives on. We’ve now bought property in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, near the New Mexico border, more than a hundred acres. All of it bare-ass naked land. DesertUSA.com = http://www.desertusa.com/cgi-bin/swish-cgi.pl ExploreHistoricCalifornia.com = http://explorehistoricalif.tripod.com/xplorhistcal/id49.html