It's done ... we have land!
I know that sounds a little dramatic, but we've been looking for land for 18 months. Here's the cliff notes version (skip it if you don't want to know the pain of finding a piece of land) ...
Looked around for several months and decided 10 acres was too small and 40 acres was too big. First offer on a property was in September of 2009 - 20 acres in Danville - low balled (it was close to the city dump), but nothing came of it. Second offer was an old horse farm in Mooresville a month later - unfortunately the owner had just declared bankruptcy and the bank was still thinking short sale - went 6 months without a response to our offer. There were other places - 15 acres in Whiteland (one big floodplain), 17 acres in Plainfield (competing bidder won out), 30 acres in Greenfield (land was actually 37 acres), 20 acres in Greenfield (really overpriced) - there were probably a few others that I've blocked out. Even did the auction thing a couple of times - but low interest rates and high corn prices made $8K/acre dirt cheap.
So what were the lessons learned?
1. You can learn as much (if not more) about the land market (or any market) - if you put your mind to it. The online tools are such that you can see all the real estate transactions and know what you're buying and who's bought what when.
2. You have to be patient. Never thought spending more than $100K in this economy would be so hard.
3. Everyone (Realtors, Sellers, Lenders) - they all have their own incentives - you need to make sure they overlap - they rarely do.
4. Very few people truly understand how much the economy was screwed in early 2009 - when people stop making economic transactions (in this case, buying and selling of land), then the whole machinery comes to a grinding halt, and it takes the work of God to get it going again.
5. The idea that the market has perfect information and the best price will be made in capitalism is a load of horse shit. Call me a Communist, but people play in the capitalistic World because they think they know something that other people don't.
6. Low quality outsourcing costs a company in ways you never imagined ... that old horse farm in Mooresville that we made an offer on in October 2009 ... turns up we ended up buying it 14 months later for a lot less. If you had a real person on the phone that cared about your company, you would have known to take our first offer, instead the bank kept this dead asset on their books for more than a year and ended up losing $50K more on it - how's that for a return on investment.
So what's the details on the property? It's in Mooresville (can't be more specific else Rebecca will drop off a truck load of dogs and cats while we're at work). It's 20 acres (a little over 8 hectares) - which is about the perfect size for us - albeit huge. There are three buildings on the property - a crappy house that will make a nice tax deduction to the fire department, a 35' X 35' garage that needs some paint and a concrete floor, and a 75' X 100' horse barn that's just a monstrosity of fun. We weren't in the market for a horse barn, but hey, when it's essentially free, we'll take it.
The land is something rare in Indiana these days - it's naturally fertile - thanks to a host of prairie plants. When we were out there in the dead of summer and after 2 months of drought - the fields were unique in that they were so lush and green. Turns out years of horse poop, and then 3 years of no one being on it - tends to make Mother Nature come back with a vengeance.
We closed at the end of December 2010, and we hope to break ground on the house in the Spring - lots to do before then, but we might get lucky.
