Oh come now! It hurts me that you’re wasting time on the internet when you could be down at the soup kitchen!
Yes. I know that I could get a lot in the ghetto for little to nothing up front, but I’m dealing with all that baggage that is attached to the land which ends up making the total cost of ownership more than nominal. The idea is that my “worthless” land would have a trivial maintenance cost - say $20-50 in taxes per year and I would be able to say that I was a landowner, and perhaps take a GF or friends out to the land on vacation and say, “Crack open the beers, this is my land here.”
And what if buying worthless land from someone for $100 gives them enough money to buy gas to go on a job interview that lands them a job? Or gives them enough money to buy cancer medicine? The world is too incredibly complex to make these kinds of value judgments.
county land auctions no minimum bid, happens twice yearly - must love dirt roads, some with no access points, others between the hatfields and mccoys, many fulled with junk.
but the air is free.
What about those Federal Oil/Gas land leases? You can aquire Federal land on a long-term lease, for next to nothing (if it has no potential for oil or gas underneath. Is a long-term lease as good as owning the land? (Canyou build on it)?
I can think of two problems:
it will be quite difficult to avoid additional expenses like ground tax and so on.
People who own a worthless piece of land will wonder why you want to buy it. They will suspect that either you’re an idiot and try to rip you off, or suspect that you know something that you don’t that makes this really worth something.
Imagine if you try to buy a rock somebody took from the mountain. Why? Either that rock has value (gold, diamond, gem) or it’s a personal memory (the rock you yourself took during a trip with your friend).
As has been said, because of running costs, buying a piece of land that you can’t develop and that’s not holding a secret (cache of gold/uran… underneath*/ is going to be bought for the next highway at higher cost…) is essentially a money loss.
- in which case you need to also buy the rights to mine underneath your ground
If you only want to buy that piece to put a chair there and watch the sunset over the Rockies/ the Florida ocean, then there are still a bunch of costs: travel to and from, amenities out there. Local zoning laws might forbid you to live there, and the city council/ officials might not want you to sit in a chair for fear you want to sneak a mobile home there and live all day long.
That’s also why I wouldn’t want to win “an island all of your own!” as some companies offer: it’s some rocks near Newfoundland, where it costs thousands of to fly, ten thousands of to build a hut, no drinking water, no food (all to be transported there) - nice for a holiday, but you can’t live there, and the expense of a holiday there can easily be much greater than a pre-package tour in a cheap country with better weather.
The people who do the scams work together with the owners of the swamp, usually because the owners know they can’t make any money from this piece otherwise, but lie to the victims that an investment is just around the corner/ it’s not swamp, but building ground all certified/ it’s got oil underneath etc.
Many thousands of parcels in Taos and Luna counties, New Mexico, were subdivided and sold during the 1960s through magazine ads to purchasers who’ve never seen their “ranchettes.” In fact, the most common inquiry at the tourist office in Deming, N.M., is from retirees passing through, trying to find their land. The taxes are generally less than a dollar a year, so people just keep sending them in until they actually see their little patch of desert, only reachable by 4WD vehicle. So each quarter, hundreds of parcels go up in tax auctions, or any local real estate agent can set you up with one. If you want hundreds of acres, investigate BLM land sales.
Exactly. I was surfing around looking at land in California, and there is an 89 acre chunk of land next to a state park that is restricted to ag use only for $200,000. $3k per acre for land with water on it [it has streams and a pond] for ag use is pretty cheap for Central Valley. [It is over near Coarsegold]
If I had the 200K, I would jump on it, it is perfect for what mrAru and I would love to do. sigh
This thread stirred some memories-many years ago, I had an Indian-American friend who bought 20 acres of land in northern Maine.
He was convinced that the land would be worth lots of money…some day.
Except that the county he bought in has been losing population for the past 60 years…and many of the towns nearby are almost ghost towns.
I guess that qualifies as “worthless”.
Hey, it even has somewhere to hang your coat.
Yup, and if you hang a couple hundred coats, you’ll have a nice shelter.
Not being familiar with US housing estate layouts, is it usual not to have boundary hedges or fencing around the front and sides of a house?
The first thing that strikes me is that surely anyone wishing to live in such a place would wish to ensure their exclusive use and not have total strangers be able to walk right around and about.
On a serious note on those Detroit homes, Wayne County has very high taxes. If they want to unload those (what used to be) houses they should waive all past due property taxes.
To casdave:
Curious you should mention having people “walking around and about” your private property.
As stated above, I live on my piece of heaven, 36 acres out in the Middle of Nowhere, USA.
For us, that’s in Arizona.
Arizona is a “Free-Range” state.
Simply put, if you are not in an incorporated town or city, range animals have the right to meader at will wherever they choose to go. Highways have fences along the right-of-way, and cattle guard crossings are placed where roads meet the highways, to keep unwanted stock off the traveled way.
A stock owner pays a fee to the State to place his animals out on the range, and they turn 'em loose.
If a property owner does NOT want these animals (typically cattle) on his or her property, a fence must be erected, that meets the legal standard of a “stock-controlled fence.”
I am eagerly awaiting the day when we can put up our fence. It’s more than annoying to see the cows sauntering across my land, and it can scare the bejeezus out of me to look up from whatever I’m doing and see a cow staring in my window at me! (My sister-in-law calls them “peeping cows.”)
~VOW
Talk to Mitch and Murray.
Don’t you have someplace to occupy?
Northern Ontario. It suits your criteria: you can be as remote and far from anyone as you wish, there is no soil (it’s either billion-year-old granite or boggy muskeg), no services, inconvenient to reach, and a terrible climate.
To the best of my knowledge, it has been surveyed, but that’s about it. It’s owned by the government. Why not make them an offer?
You absolutely cannot buy acres and acres of cheap land in Alaska. Yes, there are millions of acres of inaccessable worthless tundra and glacier and rock in Alaska. No, you can’t buy it because all those lands are National Parks, State Parks, National Monuments, National Forests, State Forests, National Wildlife Reserves, State Wildlife Reserves, military land, native lands, and on and on. None of these lands are for sale.
You can buy land in Alaska, but only from the tiny fraction of parcels that aren’t public lands of one kind or another. If you want acres of worthless land you need to look at the lower 48 where the government granted title to land willy-nilly back in the 1800s.
Maybe an old strip mine which hasn’t been remediated? Surely there must be a few dotted around where the mining company’s gone bust and there’s a big hole in the ground for you to buy a slice of.
I was going to suggest buying a lot inCentralia, Pennsylvania, but I see the state seized the whole town back in 1992.
And maybe hazmat cleanup liability for brownfields.
*Lionel Hutz - *Listen, it’s time I let you in on a little secret, Marge. The right house is the house that’s for sale. The right person is anyone.
*Marge - *But all I did was tell the truth.
*Lionel Hutz - *Of course you did. But there’s the truth [shakes his head], and the truth! [smiles brightly and nods] Let me show you. [opens a real estate listings book]
*Marge - *It’s awfully small.
*Lionel Hutz - *I’d say it’s awfully cozy. [turns page]
*Marge - *That’s dilapidated.
*Lionel Hutz - *Rustic! [turns page]
*Marge - *That house is on fire!
*Lionel Hutz - *Motivated seller!
An old mine, strip or otherwise, would probably have to be “reclaimed” before title would transfer.
And right THERE, my friend, is where your sticking point is. In order to have true ownership of this worthless piece of land, you have to have a deed RECORDED. For that to happen, a whole boatload of conditions may need to be satisfied.
I saw upthread where you said you might like to take a bunch of friends to this land to sit in lawn chairs and drink beer and watch the sun set.
There are two conditions in that sentence which will negate your request for aforesaid “worthless piece of land.” You are talking about access and real estate level enough for lawn chair sitting.
I think this idea might best be left for daydreams.
~VOW