Buying land differs greatly from buying a house

Residential real estate is a whole different ball game than the rural variety, and purchasing property in the great unknown is a big step for any urban dweller. Here are a few of the more important items to consider before taking the plunge.

First, as Tim Murphy of Hall and Hall ranch sales points out, many buyers neglect to recognize that they’re buying land: the dirt, the water, the trees, and the grass. It’s not simply a homesite, and buyers who’d like to retain the value of the land they’ve purchased shouldn’t think of it as such.

“One mistake that occurs in the rural sector is buying a piece of land and building a really big house on it. Oftentimes, if you’re in and around a suburban city or in and around a resort community, that’s where you see the value on the home appreciate,” Murphy says. “The values on the homes in the rural sector generally depreciate, especially if they’re really large homes.

In fact, Murphy says that properties with the nicest houses are often the hardest to sell. It stems from the fact that many buyers are looking to make their own mark on the land. So remember when building, your Rocky Mountain mansion could be another’s mountainside monstrosity.

The second point to consider is that basic principle of real estate: location, location, location. City slickers flocking to areas in rural America are often doing so to escape the grind of urban life. When you’re blood is simmering in four lanes of traffic on a Friday afternoon, a lake house 100 miles from nowhere sounds like a dream. According to Murphy, however, what many people think they want isn’t actually what they are after.

“A lot of people coming from the city have this vision that they want to be out in the wild somewhere … away from everything,” Murphy says. “I think that [on short trips], they miss some of the amenities that they had in closer proximity.”

Naturally, the deeper into the wilderness you go, the harder it is to come by creature comforts. The veteran landowner doesn’t wane at this reality. But for new recreational property owners who spend only days and weeks at a time on their land, some form of civilization in close proximity is almost always necessity. After all, it is a recreational property.

 As Murphy points out, “Around resort communities or western towns like Bozeman and Missoula … generally there is a one-hour doughnut. Most people like to stay within an hour of a commercial airport and also want to have the ability to go out to a restaurant every once in a while and things like that.”

One final word of wisdom: Don’t be a part-time landowner wanting to buy a full-time property. Just like overbuilding, overbuying can be a major pitfall.

Land upkeep, whether it be riparian zones, fences, or grasses, often requires a full-time ranch manager. Murphy says, “You can’t just buy a big landscape and not do anything with it. If it’s an agricultural ranch, there is a level of agriculture that would have to continue on that for the land to be healthy.”

Smaller parcels don’t need full-time help, but in a super-sized society, buyers tend to think bigger is better. Murphy says he often talks people out of buying larger pieces of land if they’re unprepared to manage it. The result: a happy recreational landowner.

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