clo,
Thanks for the interest! No purchase yet. My wife is filling out a preliminary contract, but the formal offer will need some legaleze that a lawyer I've just hired will be inserting to it next week. It doesn't go to the seller until that wording is finalized. I'll then have to see if the offer gets accepted or countered, and the lawyer will continue doing research that could undermine the whole thing. I'll be able to back out if he finds anything ugly (liens, mostly). He estimates it will take 60 days to close, so we're looking at October.
I'm looking forward to posting some pictures here - when I'm back. Probably on Sunday. Maybe even a youtube video. I'm still planning to return to the property one more time, maybe today. As it turns out, my visiting mother-in-law is the only one who took good photos (I had a videocamera), so one more visit to it is a must. She's flown back home (California) now, and I'm not going to get a copy of her pictures, so taking more still shots is a must. Fortunately, as I'm sure you've noticed, the weather today is great!
The parcel is 100 acres exactly, mostly wooded with a beautiful 18-acre, cleared, nearly-flat field atop a hill. Most of the land continues beyond the hilltop, but it is all heavily forested. That's both a plus and a minus. For farming, I much prefer cleared land. But 18 acres is nothing to sneeze at, and all those trees beyond the field are harvestable. The land was recently evaluated by a logging company and determined to have 250,000 board feet of harvestable timber.
I don't actually know if that's very much, or what it might be worth. I'm sure that if *I* bought the land, I wouldn't have it logged for many years to come. I'm not into burning my bridges, and timber is a crop just like anything else I might want to grow.
There's a steep drop beyond the field, then another steep climb that I haven't yet walked. At this point, I haven't even seen half of the land, but I've seen enough to know that I want it.
I also want to stick a shovel into that field. If I don't hit bedrock all over the place, it'll be like winning a lottery. I didn't see ANY rock poking up through the soil, and that's unusual. In New Hampshire - the Granite State - finding land with a significant amount of topsoil is like winning the lottery.
The field has a stand of pine trees that are Xmas-tree sized. That suggests the field and hill may be sand or gravel. Either would be great. It also has a hundred or more crabapple trees, mostly bush-sized, growing on it. That tells me that apple trees will flourish.
And the deed already makes mention of cherry trees, so I know they'll grow.
The hilltop view is remarkable, and both a stream and a snow-mobiling path cross onto the property, well to the property's rear. There's easy access to it from just off the property, so I walked that path a ways - paralleling the steam and circling part of the property but never made it to the point where it entered the property.
On the property map, there's another stream cutting across the property's middle. I found it... and it was bone dry. So I wouldn't actually have two "rivers" on the land. Rather, I'd have a brook and a creek. In fact, the creek on my existing property still has some flow right now, so this other creek is obviously no big deal. Or it's only getting snow runoff that ends when the snow is gone.
The brook that ISN'T dry isn't nearly as big as it looked a few weeks ago either. It's got a good flow, though, and will obviously run year round. It's about 20 reet across on average, I'd guess. But while I first compared it with the Truckee River (a small California river some of this board is familiar with), I now think this brook has just a quarter the water that the Truckee usually has. Who knows, though? It could be dramatically larger in the Spring, when snow runoff is populating it. The Truckee comes out of Lake Tahoe and is controlled by a dam. It's NEVER very large...
Walking the property's perimeter would be a challenge. It's large, and the terrain is also rugged in places. I'd guess it would take three hours. Figuring out the exact borders would probably be impossible - for me at least. The deed description is full of things like "From the cherry tree with a metal spike in it along XXXX Road, 273 feet Northeast, more or less (yes, it really says that), to a metal pole inserted into the ground." Heh. Probably written 75 years ago. I didn't ever see a cherry tree along XXXX Road, by the way!
The big issue with the land is that, big as it is, it has just 105 feet of road frontage. In the parts of New Hampshire I've been exposed to, 150 feet is required for any construction. But this land is in a different county, and the realtor believes the requirement is for just 100 feet of frontage. The lawyer is looking into it.
If there's a problem there, the lawyer thinks it will be surmountable. Because of the lot size, he thinks the town will issue an exception or a variance permitting construction.
But if they won't, then this is a deal breaker.
And then, of course, there's the question of whether my offer will be accepted. I'm making an offer that is, to my way of thinking, very low. Several people in the area encouraged me to do that, stating that the real estate market is terrible right now. I'm willing to go higher if that's what's needed, but the owner may just say no and sell the property to someone else. It's been on the market for close to two months now, and he may be getting antsy.
So, it's up in the air. I very much hope to get it, but I don't know.
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