Blog archives for July, 2006

Searching for any property in a new area is hard because you have to learn about the neighborhood, traffic patterns, access to shopping and entertainment, etc. Searching for empty, wooded, property with no street address is even harder. You have to do a lot (pardon the pun) imagining.

Wooded lots are hard to see. Some lots are hard to even move around in to find the property edges. You have to learn to read survey plats, topographic maps, and aerial photos. You have to trudge through overgrown hill and dell. If you are lucky, you can find a spot or two where you can see what the “view” will be once you clear a home site. If not, you have to imagine based on Google Earth and Teraserver images.

The old real estate adage goes, “the 3 most important things in real estate are location, location, and location.” However, for rural property, you have to add the words perk test, well, utilities, easements, mineral/oil and timber rights, land use restrictions to your vocabulary. If the soil of the property won’t perk (let gray water sewer effluent from a septic drain field percolate into the soil at a high enough rate), you can’t build on it.
If you can’t find water (either drill a well, tap a spring, or buy water from a neighbor), the land is useless to build on. If someone else owns timber rights to your property, your pretty wooded property can become a scene from Twister. You get the picture.

Some of these things are covered in the contract to purchase. There is a contingency in the contract that the perk test must pass. You can require that all rights convey to you or the deal is off. You check with power and phone companies to make sure you can get access before making an offer. However, others have to wait till you are ready to build (like the well). You can mitigate the risks by talking with well drillers, neighbors, etc. but you can’t eliminate it completely.

Keeping all these things in mind, we worked with a realtor to find candidate lots for sale. Using the power of the internet, we were able to eliminate many because they had the wrong slope, or they were too near a high-voltage transmission tower line, or they have awkward access (like driving through a river to get to the property). After shrinking the list to a set of good candidates, you have to go and walk the property to see if it is the one you want.

We found one property that looked good but the neighbors had bad well drilling experiences. Water was likely there but it might be expensive to find. That risk was too much for us to take.

Widening our scope, we found several more. Some were a little too rural for us. Others were too close to the main road. After much searching, we found one that seemed to have most of what we wanted. It was away from busy roads but was on a paved county road. It was sloped but not so steep that a drive way would require many switchbacks to get to the building site. It was a little more open than we thought we wanted but we can fix that over time.

After doing all the background checks we could, we made an offer. The seller made a counter offer which we accepted. Now we are working through all the required steps before closing. The perk test passed a few days ago but we still need to apply for the official certification letter that guarantees we have a site we can build on. This requires some survey work that needs to be done. Lots of details to work through but the road ahead is beginning to smooth out.

I was asked if we have any photos of the property. I do, but as I’ve explained, it can be hard to see a wooded property and none of the photos do the site justice.

Below is a view of a path in the property that will likely be part of our drive. You are standing near the top of the property looking down the path.

Below is a view of our “view”. The neighbor to the west grows hay so his property is open.

Well, almost. “On or about July 28″ (don’t you just legal talk!) we will close on a piece of property in Floyd County, VA. Denise and I have been looking for some time for a retirement/vacation place in the mountains. On our most recent trip to Cleveland to bring Alana home from school, we decided to take the long way and look at the country around the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.

Our goal was to find land that was not too far from Cary (3-4 hour drive) so we could use it on the weekend without wearing ourselves out, was far enough North and high enough in altitude so that it would be cooler than Cary so we could comfortably spend the summer there, and that was both remote and had enough culture so that would could find both solitude and entertainment within a reasonable drive. We also believed that we wanted a wooded, sloped lot so that we would have a view and, as Denise put it, she did not have to have window treatments to get privacy.

In terms of driving distance, that 3-4 hours would let us go a far west as Boone, NC and as far north as almost to Charlottesville, VA. In prior trips, we had found places like we wanted in the NC mountains but most of the land was out of our price range. So, we set our sights on Virginia this trip.

Using the power of the internet, Denise found is a couple of B&B’s in along the Parkway. We figured that staying in a B&B would let us better get to know the area. We planned to talk our time to travel 80-100 miles of Parkway, stop in a few of the towns, check out some of the shops, etc. We also hoped to do a little hiking, take some photos, and just experience some nature from.

Our first stop was in Bedford, VA which is near the Peaks of Otter. The town of Bedford was nice but a little too big for us and not quite the cultural hub we were looking for. We enjoyed hiking to the top of Harken Hill at the Peaks of Otter. Also, the general altitude for the land was lower than we were hoping for unless you bought expensive land near the Peaks.

We discovered that much of the area away from the Parkway north of Bedford was either part of the Jefferson or George Washington National Forests which make it hard to find mountain land for sale. We had to get south of Roanoke before the land on both sides of the Parkway was private. Our next stop was the town of Floyd, VA.

The town of Floyd has a population of about 500 folks with about 15000 in the entire county. The one stoplight in the county is in downtown Floyd. However, we weren’t in town more that a few minutes before we found a “Whole Food’s” like place called Harvest Moon that had a artist’s gallery / coffee shop on the second floor called Over the Moon Cafe. We later learned about Cafe Del Sol and Oddfellas Cantina which also have great food and live music. The Floyd Country Store has something called the Friday Night Jamboree every Friday night with live music. There are poetry reading, blogger’s meet-ups, book signings, etc. This area was what we were looking for: small town charm with big town art/music/culture; rural isolation with access to DSL to most of the county.

We canceled our reservation further south and booked another night in the Ambrosia Farm B&B outside Floyd. We visited the Chateau Morrisette for a wine tasting. We had lunch at Cafe Del Sol and bought a CD at County Records. We looked at some property with a realtor and discovered that the land here was less that the NC Mountains. We should be able to afford the size property we wanted.

Being on a schedule, we left Floyd to pick up Alana at college. After we got her home and settled in, we contacted a realtor to start the search. That search resulted in the property that we should close on at the end of the month. That search deserves its own post.