If you want to live out in the country as I do eventually, I wouldn’t mind having a corn field or another farm field as a neighbor rather then a residential property. Great place to spot deer and wildlife, except for when a farmer is working the land, it is vacant and quiet. Sure, at times of year when manure and anhydrous ammonium is applied, it can be smelly, but cornfields don’t complain and aren’t bothered about what goes on your own land. Sometimes farmers work late into the night in fields, but it’s not an all year thing.
A cornfield ain’t going to complain about the smoke from your woodstove, your burn barrel or bonfire, they won’t care if you listen to music too loud, they don’t care if you leave a light on out back or make some noise when you have friends over. Cornfields don’t care about smelly livestock or your compost pile or your garden or your barking dog. Yes, you must respect private property, fence in your pigs and goats, and be fire safe, but the farmer just wants to grow his crop to feed his livestock, and if you leave him alone, he unlikely to bother you — and he probably does much on his land which you do on your own.
After watching that video I was thinking about all the tools I have for land research with public data and GIS tools 🗺
Most counties and states now publicly post tax maps and rolls. If I can connect to those REST Services then I can have fairly good idea of property lines, assessed value and taxes. Using R Studio I can easily calculate the assessed value per acre in an area or for similar properties.
Then then there is a lot I can find out about a property without ever even stepping foot on it. Aerial photography, especially the most-common leaf-less type taken either in April or November before the snow can show a lot about what conditions are like on the ground. It can give on an idea of what buildings exist there, what trees and pasture exist. What kind of logging practices have taken past in the recent past. In addition, most places now have a wide variety of historical aerial photos available. For most areas, you can easily get aerial photos from the 1950s and early 1960s, which can give you insight on whether or not the land was farmed in the recent past.
But maybe the next most interesting is the information one can obtain from LIDAR elevation data. In most cases, LIDAR survey data can show stone wells, gullies, potential wetlands and swamps, and old trash dumps above grade. Basically anything that is ground cover, that is not trees. If you download the full-point cloud data, you can get things like building and tree heights, which can give you more ideas on what trees are on the property and what is salable.
It’s actually quite remarkable what you can do with modern databases, some R code and GIS data to discover a lot about land that might in a few years back be unknowable without a detailed, on the ground property survey. I am fortunate to have so many resources available at my finger tips these days — recognizing though that other people also have access to data, though maybe others aren’t quite as talented when it comes to working with big data or sifting through GIS data.
There is more to buying raw land than meets the eye and more than a few individuals have wished they’d had a second chance upon finding themselves duped, conned, misled, ill-advised, uninformed, oversold, undereducated and often unprepared. They realize, often too late, that a raw land purchase should be properly investigated, evaluated and negotiated using a logical and rational plan.
Let me start by saying I’m not a geologist, soil analyst, surveyor, engineer or land consultant. I’m a passionate real estate investor, licensed agent, appraisal assistant and landlord who purchased various raw lots, as large as a 15-acre parcel, for investment and building projects. In addition, I have consulted with numerous individuals proficient in real estate, who have contributed to my general awareness of the conditions and merits of raw land. We, as small investors, can further use this information to our advantage in wisely choosing land and utilizing it to it’s highest and best use regarding fulfillment of our needs, wants and desires.
