How To Spot BAD LAND In 60 Seconds

Transcript

00:00

All land looks good on the surface, but the thing is that's your biggest problem. The reason that's your biggest problem is because the costly issues are so subtle that what looks like good land on the surface might actually be bad land.

And you might not notice it until after you close the deal. And that's the worst thing that you can possibly do.

00:16

Can you tell the difference between good land and bad land? If so, how quickly can you tell?

And how confident are you in that process? Because the good news for you is that if you have any doubt about the land that you're buying, you don't need to.

Because in this video, what we're going to do is I'm going to walk you through a simple process that we've developed to help identify bad

00:33

land using a very simple six-step process that's going to help you sort between good land and bad land across six simple features. First, what I'm going to do is show you the six steps in the process.

I'm going to break down each step using examples. Then, what I'm going to do when we get to the end is I'm going to pick a property off of

00:48

Zillow and just do a live walkthrough so that I can show you how quickly you can see whether a piece of land is good or bad. and I'm going to do it hopefully under 60 seconds.

The six-part system that we've developed to help spot bad land looks at six different features of the physical characteristics of a

01:04

property. The system is called assess.

And I'm going to walk you through each of the six steps. The A in assess stands for access.

The first S stands for soil. The second S stands for slope.

The E stands for environmental. The third S stands for street view.

And the fourth S

01:20

stands for satellite view. So, we're going to look at each of these six steps in the process using a specific property as an example.

This is an 8.9 acre piece of farmland that we flipped a couple years ago. This is going to be the example property of what good looks like across each of these six phases.

And for

01:35

each segment of this analysis where this property shows a good attribute, I'm going to pick an example and show you one that looks bad so you can tell the difference across each of these six steps. Now, let's first look at access.

This is the first step in the assess analysis model. So, when you talk about

01:51

access, you're talking about legal and physical access. Legal access is, can I get to the property without illegally trespassing on a neighbor's land?

And physical access is, can I get to the property by car? Access is really a big deal for vacant land because you have to be able to get to a property in order to

02:06

use it. Goes without saying.

Now, let's take a look at the 8.9 acres. This is in a town called Eureka, North Carolina, about 1 hour east of Raleigh.

And this is an 8.9 acres right off of the main street in the main uh intersection in the center of the town. And what's good about access with this property is you

02:22

realize access is not just binary. Like do you have legal access?

Do you have physical access? It's also qualitative and quantitative.

What kind of access do you have? And how much of it do you have?

Because what makes the access on this property really compelling is that you have over 500 ft of road frontage on

02:38

this countymaintained road. And because of that, you're able to actually split this 8.9 acre lot up into as many as six separate building lots.

The idea that you can split this into six lots makes it more valuable because instead of having one home site, you have six. Incidentally, that's actually what the

02:54

guy who bought that land from us ended up doing. He split it six ways.

And we're going to get to that in just a second so you can see it. But that's what makes this access valuable.

And that's a good example of what access looks like. So, what does bad access look like?

Let's turn the page and take a look at this property in Belleview Road in Moore County, North Carolina.

03:11

This is about 90minute drive away from the first property. When you look at this property, it's about one acre and it's set about 500 feet or so south of the county road to the north.

And what's noteworthy is that you don't have any legal or physical access here at all. Now, the legal access, you can tell

03:26

because you do not have a driveway or a way to get into the property physically cuz you have a section of woods to the north that blocks your ability to drive there by car. But what about legal access?

Because if you were to buy a property like this, there's a chance that using this county map, you don't see all the possible access easements

03:42

that may apply to this land. Because when you go and look at a property like this, just because it looks landlocked doesn't mean it actually is.

Because if you had a right ofway on the eastern or western boundary of this property, there's a lot of properties that appear landlocked but actually have this type of 30-foot wide rightway that only shows

03:59

up on the legal description of the property deed or a recorded plat map at the county register of deeds. But in this case, you don't have that.

So, it looks landlocked and it is landlocked. And so, you have neither of the two attributes of access for this property.

And so, that's really not a property

04:14

that you would want to buy for anything that would cost you more than a couple thousand bucks to buy that land. By the way, if you haven't downloaded the free due diligence checklist for land buyers, it's in the description and I invite you to do that.

I think it might be helpful for you. Now, let's take a look at the second step of the process.

Now, this is soil. When we talk about soil for vacant

04:31

land, especially rural land, the importance of soil comes down to one word and that one word is septic. You know, the reason that septic is so important is when you're outside the city and you're relying on septic to be able to manage the waste water from a future home, then you have to have certain soil characteristics on the land

04:46

that you're buying in order to do that. But if you don't have that soil characteristic that allows the water to drain through the soil, then you can't build a septic, which means you can't build a home.

Which means that the land that you thought was worth $50,000 might not even be worth 10. So you have an 80% price differential on this one thing.

05:02

And the characteristics that drive soil quality for septic, you can't even see it from the ground. So you need experts to come in and tell you what you have, or else you're really going to get hurt if you buy the wrong property.

Now, let's go back to the 8.9 acres in Eureka. I want to show you what a good soil map looks like.

Because when we pull this soil map up, the predominant

05:18

soil series on this property is what's called Norfol lomy sand, which is a really good sign. This is a deep, well- drained soil.

And the problem with that though is that you can't just bank on what the county soil map shows. You have to be able to verify it with a site visit from a soil scientist or a site evaluator from the county environmental

05:34

health office. In this case, we hired one of our soil scientists to go out to the property and he confirmed most of the soil map was usable for septic.

In fact, if you see his map, the PS stands for provisionally suitable. Provisionally suitable basically means you're good for septic.

But what's noteworthy is that the soil map does not

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have as much suitable soil as would be implied by the county map, which is why it's important that you check. But if you can visualize what a six lot subdivide would be like on this property, if you can draw those boundary lines east to west, parallel, north to south, stacked up one lot, you know,

06:07

north of the other, what's relevant is that even though you don't have good soil on all the land, you have a stripe that goes through the middle of that 8.9 acres that allows you to put a home in the front of each of those building lots and a septic in the back. And that's exactly what this guy did.

So what's

06:22

relevant about soil for septic is you don't need all the land to have good usable soil for septic. If you're buying a 1acre lot, something like 15% of the land being well drained, suitable soil for septic, that's all you need.

Because when you have 45,000 or so square feet

06:38

on a 1acre piece of land, if you have 6 or 7,000 square ft for an initial septic system and repair, that's generally what you're going to need at minimum in order to build a three-bedroom residence. Now, let's take a look at a bad property as it relates to soil.

Ironically, this is a property where on the soil map, you

06:54

can actually see the rains series soil right on the county soil map, and this is a notoriously poorly drained soil series in this part of the country. But we still took a run at the property, we still wanted to buy it.

We were getting a good deal cuz we were buying it at $10,000 thinking that even after all the

07:10

closing costs and everything, we could sell it at 35,000. And if we could do that, we could make a bunch of money in the process, even if we're taking a little bit of risk.

But see, the reason that we filed for the uh soil report that we hired the soil scientist here, even though most of the soil map is bad is that you do have a little section in

07:27

the southwest corner that looks like you might have a little bit of a soil series coming in that might be better drained than rains. But alas, when we sent the soil scientist out to the property, he told us that no, the soil's no good.

You can't build on it. He actually told me, look, it's it's you can't even build a

07:42

mound or a drip system. He gave me the courtesy of saying, "Hey, do you want me to write up the report and charge you full price or do you want to save a little money and we can just leave it at that?" Cuz I've been working with this guy for a couple years at this point.

And he was giving us a courtesy cuz he was just going to write a map and draw a map of how bad the soil was on this

07:58

land. So, we saved 150 bucks on that even though we probably spent another $800 on that on that property.

Now, this property that we thought would sell for $35,000 with a single septic system for a single home site. without that one septic system.

Market value probably

08:13

7500 8 grand. Same property.

It's the type of property you can kind of tell when they cut in this subdivision back in the day. They had this big slab of property that they could have put a couple different home sites on, but they didn't.

And it's not a coincidence. They didn't forget to develop that land and

08:28

sell those building lots to people that wanted to build a home in that area. They realized then what we realize now, which is that it's totally unbuildable.

Now, let's take a look at the third step in the process. This is slope.

And when we go to the property on North Carolina State Road 222 in Eureka, it's so flat and you can tell by the contour lines

08:45

how far spaced out they are that you could actually play ping pong or billiards just about anywhere on this property. Like you could put a ping-pong table, billiards table.

I I'll beat you at ping pong and billiards by Well, ping pong for sure. I'll beat you at ping pong, but billiards, h you know, I've seen better days.

In eighth grade, I

09:01

used to play with my friends, but those days are long gone. I've lost my edge a little bit.

But the point is that you could play. We could play on this property.

It is that flat. So, we're checking the box here for slope.

It is a very good property and it checks that box and that this is a good property in that feature. Now, let's look at what a bad property looks like for slope.

You

09:17

see this 42 acres in Wils County. This is a section of the state of North Carolina.

You're getting out towards the western part of the state where you're getting more into the mountains, which is great for seclusion and privacy and with these great big pine forests, a lot of great outdoor recreation. But when you look at the contour lines on this

09:32

property, you have all these contour lines tightly clustered in close to one another. And that's relevant because contour lines show differential elevation above sea level.

So if you have 2T or 4T or 10 or 5T contours, the unit of measure is the difference in

09:47

elevation above sea level from one line to the next. So the tighter in the lines are together, the more slope that you're seeing across a certain horizontal distance.

So you want to be careful to understand the unit of measure. So a twoft contour line, you know, if you expose a filter that's 20 foot contour

10:04

lines, the 20 foot lines are going to be spread way further out even for the same property. So it can understate the severity of the slope if you're not careful and you don't see the notation of the difference between the contour lines and elevation.

But what you want to do for something like this to assess the severity of the slope, a couple

10:20

rules of thumb apply. Number one is that when you get above 10, 10% slope, 10% grade, that's kind of where it gets a little more challenging and expensive.

above 15% for sure, but sometimes in these mountain subdivisions, you see people building homes on greater slope than that. And so, you can do it.

But

10:35

the Limitus test for the land that you're buying is follow the contour lines. Zoom out, look at the slope where you want to build on that land, and then compare and trace those contour lines in either direction and look at where the homes are built.

Are other homes being built on similar slope? Or as is most

10:51

likely in cases like this, are the homes being built in pockets where it's a little bit flatter and that in fact the grade that you have on that land is unlike any other grade where homes are being built, in which case you're not going to want to buy that type of land. Now, let's take a look at the environmental phase of this analysis.

11:06

This is going to refer to wetlands and flood plane. Let's take a look at the North Carolina 222 property.

Again, just spotless. This is a great property.

It has no flood plane or wetlands whatsoever. Now, when you look off the eastern border of the property across the eastern boundary line, you see what

11:22

appears to be a natural stream on the neighbor's land and some wetlands that is connected to that, maybe like a pond or a marsh, but that's not on our land. So, we're not affected by that.

And so, all of our property is outside of the wetlands and flood zone. So, we're checking that box and we're looking good there.

Now, unlike this property in Hope

11:38

County, this is a 2acre piece of land on Fire Tower Lane. And what you see about this 2acre property, it's set back from the roadaways, which is you have the aquamarine or the turquoise blue that is in the southeastern part of this of this map is the 100red-year flood zone.

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that's your flood zone. And then the translucent darker blue, that's going to be your wetlands.

What you see here, this property is totally covered in wetlands and it's even partially covered in flood zone. But beyond that, it also has bad access because it looks like there are two access roads that are undeveloped easements that run north

12:10

south on the western side and on the eastern side. But no matter how you slice it, there's no way to install a driveway to this land without going through that wetlands and potentially the flood zone too.

which means that before you even get your driveway into that property, you are invoking all types of environmental regulations, all

12:28

types of paperwork and documentation and engineering requirement just to get into the property, which I I hope you're sitting down. Probably isn't buildable, even if it did have a driveway cuz the soils are no good here either.

So, for that reason, this property is not going to work for us. The environmental aspect of the analysis means that this is a bad

12:44

property you don't want to buy. Now, we're to go to street view.

Of course, the the original street view is just show up to the property and tour it in person. Go visit that site, take pictures, and walk the perimeter and walk every acre of the land that you're buying.

Goes without saying, and you're going to do that anyway. But at the same time, if you're shopping land online, if

13:02

you're looking on Zillow and you're going through listings in your area, we have this incredible technology called Street View, which enables you to go outside out front of a piece of land almost anywhere in the country and look at the property from the ground level, which is incredibly telling because when you look at the 8.9 acres in Wayne

13:18

County, look at the curb appeal of this property. Look at those big towering trees in the distance.

Look at that awesome big open field with incredibly rich crop land and a large open space, a open canvas that's surrounded and secluded by trees where in the middle

13:35

you can design just about anything. I mean, you can imagine just about anything being on that property.

Now, the only bad thing about this street view analysis on this land is when you get to the northern part of the property and you look around the trees, the town cemetery is right there. So, your neighbor to the north is the town

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cemetery, which is not ideal, sure, but at the same time, you're separated by that wall of trees. So, it's really not that big of a deal.

Now, let's take a look at an example of a property that is uh maybe not so good on street view. This is a.13 acre piece of land in Georgia.

And as you can see from the

14:07

satellite, which we'll get to in a second, there's train tracks. But you get down on the ground level and you look from the corner of your property across the train tracks to your neighbor across the street and wow, this man, this is a guy, by the way.

Women don't do stuff like this. This is a dude.

He just has an emporium of junk on his

14:24

property. And the thing is, what's funny is like I think it's awesome.

I don't I'm not judging this guy. What do you want me to tell you?

Like it's his land. Unless there's some ordinance that he's breaking, he's probably fine and well within his rights to do that.

But here's the thing. Do you want to look at the junk emporium every single day when you

14:40

come in and out of your property in the morning? If you have your folders coffee and you're like, you know, racing to go to your your healthcare job at the local hospital and like you see that and it's like, oh my gosh, this guy.

Then there's like another piece of junk the next day or then there's like he leaves a truck out front or whatever. On street view,

14:56

you can see the surroundings in front of the property. In some ways, it's almost more important than the property itself because that neighborhood ambiance is going to create or destroy so much market value for the land that you're buying.

And if you're selling land and you're selling it to a residential

15:12

buyer, then who's the buyer that's going to buy this property for the standpoint of getting a loan to build a home to set up shop indefinitely and move their family so that they can be next to these train tracks and the junk emporium across the street for the next 10, 15, 20 years? I don't I don't think so.

Now,

15:29

look, I'm not throwing shade, by the way. I've showed on this channel.

We flipped a 2acre lot that had train tracks behind it. And and look, like there's some some neighbors that have some junk here and there.

This doesn't mean that it's intrinsically bad land. It's just not good on the street view and it's bad on this feature.

And so,

15:44

you take this in the context of everything else. But for this property, for that land use of building a home, I would not suggest buying this particular property.

Now, let's take a look at the satellite view. This is the last step of the process.

And uh when we look at the satellite view of the North Carolina 222

16:00

property, what we find is the cemetery. Yeah, the cemetery is right there across the trees.

We know that. We knew that.

And when you zoom out a little bit further and you look further up the road, about a half mile away, there's a junkyard, which I've seen photos of that junkyard. It's like pretty when you look on satellite, it's it's pretty loud, but

16:16

it's so far away from where we are, it doesn't really affect us. And actually, when you look to the south, you've got the church.

And so the church owns two lots to the south. one the actual church building is located.

The other one has a ball field. Looks like they have a baseball field out there.

So, you've got the main street of the town to the west.

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You've got a row of hedges to the north of trees. You've got trees to the east that buffer you from the land to the east.

And then you've got the church to the south. And you're right in the middle of all the action.

So, this is what a good property looks like on satellite view. In fact, you can see how special of a property this is relative

16:47

to this town. like no no no property this big this well located this close to the town square is even available for sale.

So in that way it's really attractive. But let's look at another property that's maybe not so good.

And let's take a look at this 39.3 acre property in Halifax County, North Carolina. It's a piece of farmland and

17:03

it looks beautiful and it is. It is a beautiful piece of land.

I really like it. It's a great farm and you know the reason that satellite view is important is because when you are building a home on farmland, a lot of times people build on a farm like this you want to have a private residence.

So you want to live there, not always, but you could keep

17:19

the majority of this farmland in service and you could have a farmer either lease it out or you could plant the crop yourself and you could live there without even like displacing that much of the acreage from farming. But if you're going to live there, you want to know your neighbors.

And that's why you want to go on satellite and zoom out just a little bit. And what you see

17:35

immediately to the west is if hog farm. Look at this.

I know we've belabored this on this channel. There's hog farms all over this part of eastern North Carolina.

And this lot is no exception because your neighbor is a concentrated animal feeding operation that has thousands of hogs in a small condensed location. And I'll spare you all the

17:52

details, but let's just say that you want to make sure that you tore that property during a warm summer day just to make sure that the odor is not too noxious for the future home that you want to build there. Because I'm I'm going to suggest that it probably is.

See, this is the problem in a lot of these rural areas. It's like this land

18:07

is so great for farming, but there's a reason that the residential development and the immediate area surrounding a lot of these industrial hog farm operations is not as popular as areas, you know, half mile, 2 miles down the road. People avoid buying land close to hog farms

18:23

because if you're making an investment to build a home, you don't want to have to deal with noxious odors. You don't want to have to keep your windows shut during the summer.

It's like really crazy. And there's stuff like this in all aspects of rural America.

There's different nuisances that you'll see on satellite view. For example, you might

18:38

see, you know, wind windmills, wind farms, solar farms. Now, there there's no odor.

There's no real EMF, even though people think that there is. I did the reading on this.

There's not a lot of health risks for solar or wind. It's just the eyesore.

Anything like um logging, a logging operation, you don't

18:54

want to see that as a neighbor. um anything like industrial manufacturing, logistics, trucks coming in and out, equipment going in and out, quarry dust blowing through, you know, in the the neighboring land around the quarry.

These are the types of things that you're going to spot on satellite. And in this case, you're going to probably

19:09

avoid buying this property in the process. Okay, now we've gotten to the end of the walkthrough, and what I want to do is I want to take this property.

It's a 7 acre listing on Ridge Road in Brownsville, New Jersey, listed at $125,000. And we're going to get ready with a 60-second timer.

We'll start at zero.

19:25

We'll see if I can get it under 60 seconds. I'm going to use two two maps.

I'm going to use land ID and Google maps to go through this. Uh you can use county GIS instead of land ID.

Land ID is a paid service. Cost like 15 bucks a month, but GIS you can do the same stuff on the first four steps.

And so I'm going to go through all six features of

19:41

this analysis and we're going to assess this piece of land and we'll see if it's good or bad. Okay, ready, set, go.

We're looking at access first. This has access on a county road.

So we're checking the box. No issue there.

We're going to look at soil. This has Lake Hurst sand.

It shows excess water, but even with the

19:58

excess water, sand drains pretty quickly. And looking at the photos, it it looks like it's pretty dry on the southwestern section of the property.

We need a soil map before we buy this, but otherwise, I don't see any red flags there. Slope, there is no slope.

It's totally flat. We're good.

Environmental,

20:14

there's a few features. There's a drainage ditch on the northern boundary, goes east to west.

Then there's what looks like a natural stream that goes north south bisecting the middle of the property. Everything to the east is wetlands.

Everything to the west should be buildable for the most part. So we

20:29

have enough space to build a pretty sizable homesite. So we're good there.

Now let's go on street view. This is a nice private wooded area.

Beautiful curb appeal. Look at these nice pines along the road.

You actually see that there's a path through the trees. Probably used by hunters.

Nice rural residential

20:46

neighborhood. Let's go to satellite.

We zoom out. No red flags.

Nice neighborhood. And you're close to the town square as well.

Okay, I was close. There was what, a minute and five, 65 seconds, man.

Well, maybe if I wasn't narrating each step, I could potentially get it done in under a

21:02

minute. But you can, too.

And that's the whole point of this. When you know what to look for and you just go through a simple six-step analysis using this system, you're going to save yourself a lot of time and you're going to find the most likely red flags that can really cost you down the line if you miss them before you buy it.

I actually like this land in New Jersey. I think it's pretty

21:19

good. But just because I think it's good doesn't mean that I would actually make an offer on that land until I knew what that land was worth.

And that's going to be the topic of our next video on the channel. So, click the link below, download the checklist for due diligence if you haven't, and check out the next video about how the market sets the

21:34

price for land. I think you're really going to appreciate it.

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Summary

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