My property situation, buying new land, looking for advice

[Buckly]

Shoot me a PM

 

[savanna]

Will do

 

[M. R. Byrd]

You might want to evaluate if the small parcels would be readily saleable in the future. With the appreciation of land in many areas and with improvements you would make while you owned the land, could you sell them for purchase of a larger better located property that might come on the market in the future?

 

[MarkDarvin]

If your father in law won't fix his rotting stands, his hunting is coming to an end soon. Somebody will get hurt, or it will fall apart to the point it won't be worth the effort for the interest he has in it.

If you can float it, I'd go buy a new property and as soon as you get it closed, get your other one on the market. Might be tight for a few months, but it sounds like you might be able to unload your 25 to a neighbor easily, especially if you get them bidding against each other.

I also wouldn't get too enamored with providing opportunity for too many people. Rotate your core group of people you care about and make it work. I've considered hanging up the rifle and sticking to bow only. It would free up a space on my land during gun, and I enjoy bow way more anyway.

Lastly, what if you drove an extra hour or two? I go quite a ways to get to my property, but it saved me about tens of thousands of dollars.

 

[Chainsaw]

A second criteria that comes to mind as a result of MarkDarvin's post is to buy less expensive land with less expensive taxes. In other words land that makes for some great deer hunting is generally less expensive than land with road frontage building lot potential or land with all tillable acres. The same goes for land a little further out from the main stream as Mark noted. The best valued deer land would consist of drainages, scraggly woodland(with low valued oak trees), with some interior yet accessible tillable acres in one of New York's many agricultural zones. The tillable acres rented to a qualifying farmer can get the land classified as Agricultural which reduces the annual property tax considerably and if not road frontage does not add to it's likely sales value exorbitantly. Land situated in farm areas are generally less expensive, less problems and more enjoyable than land located in areas used as suburbs for larger cities. As a whole here, farmers are excellent neighbors.

 

[Jeff H]

It sounds like it is time to make a list of criteria for considering a new land purchase. Based on your experience in that area I would say criteria number 1 is that a property has to be in an area where most parcels are larger than 200 acres. If every property is 50 acres and has five hunters and they each want to shoot one deer each per year it won't work. Figuring it takes on average twenty acres to grow a deer 200 acres could grow enough so only 50% of the areas deer would be shot annually at a one per person rate with five hunters on each property. Shooting 50% of possible deer produced I'm considering to be maximum.

I'm not saying that people with 50 acres can't shoot even ten deer a year but it is not possible if everyone has fifty acres and wants to shoot ten deer per year when the average fifty acres is only producing 2 1/2 deer per year.

Chainsaw hit it on the head. I have 100 acres in an area with very few large parcels (80 or more acres). Smaller parcels automatically means more people. More people automatically means more problems. I was talking with a guy who works for Mossy Oak Properties last week and told him if I ever sold it would be to find a parcel surrounded by much larger parcels.