How to Earn Free Land

Are you interested in acquiring some cheap or free land? Today’s video will share a land hack that could score you a free lot in North Carolina.

Speaker 1:           How do you get a piece of land for free?

Speaker 2:           You can get free land, you can get free land. Well, let’s just take an imaginary situation. If you really want a free piece of land, it will cost you some time and some money, but let’s just say there’s a 50-acre piece of land. And you look at this 50-acre piece of land, and you discover that there are 10 perk sites on it. Well, if you’re willing to do the survey and get all the perk tests and get the subdivision approved through the county, your last two or three lots or maybe certainly your final lot will be free. If you want to get in the land development game, you can buy a piece of raw land. And it’s fascinating, I was just looking at a piece of land with a client yesterday. It was 13 acres.

It had a bunch of flood plain right in the middle of it, and the guy said he only wanted five acres. Well, the sellers wanted 225 for this 13 acres. I was like, “You know, I mean the five acres would be like 150 each.” He didn’t like the fact that it had flood in the middle, but we had a building site over here and a building site over here. He conceivably could have bought it for between 200 and 225, cut it in half, and had a five to seven acre lot with a hundred thousand equity. He could have gotten it for 50,000 or whatever. There’s a lot of manipulation of the numbers or whatever, but the way you can get land, we’re not doing Homestead Act. We’re not doing any free land. At one time and one of my buddies is in Montana. In Montana, if you go out and improve the land, you can get land for free.

There’s still federal land grant. You can go out there, stake out 10 acres, but then you have agreed to make a road out to it and get utilities to it. And if you do that, Uncle Sam will give you the land for free or whatever. We don’t have that in Chatham County. I think one of my favorite things is when we have a hundred acres for sale and it’s 5000 an acre, I will get people call me from Raleigh all the time and say, “I would like to buy one of those acres for $5000.” I was like, “Okay. Well, you have to buy a hundred of them at once,” but the land development game is really fun. And one of the interesting things is when we do a proforma for a land development and you’ll have a 13 lot subdivision, and you’ll get all the way in the back to the last lot on the road and everything.

And we call that lot profit, because you’re going to have the money in the raw land purchase. You’re going to have probably close to the same amount of money in grading, roads, survey, perk, legal fees, approval, erosion control. I mean there’s a lot that goes into the proforma, but those last two lots are going to be your profit, and that’s why we do it. So, that’s how you get a piece of land for free.