Planning to buy a plot of land for your tiny house project? Read this first to make sure get it right!
Top 10 Tips for Choosing the Right Piece of Land:
First and foremost, the premier place to find tiny house property for sale or rent, or list your tiny house property for sale or rent is TinyHouseParking.com.
10. Beware Zoning Restrictions
Most rural zoning categories will include permitted and accessory use clauses allowing you to build a tiny home on a plot, regardless of how it’s zoned. For instance, a single family dwelling is almost universally permitted on a plot of land zoned for agricultural use, though the plot may need to be of a minimum size, such as five acres. However, this isn’t always the case, and with the wealthiest members of society increasingly using litigation to have their way at all times, you would do well to verify that a given plot can be used precisely as you want to use it before you sign a contract.
If a plot of land is designated as “historic” or “aesthetic”, on the other hand, you can expect to face problems in trying to build a new home, outbuildings and gardens. The intent behind this kind of land-use planning is to set aside areas of historical value, (as in the case of archaeological sites rich with unexcavated artifacts, ruins, etc.), or for members of a community to use recreationally.
9. Beware Restrictive Covenants
Whenever a plot of land goes up for sale, the prior owner, or their neighbors, may take the opportunity to embed restrictive covenants in the deed title. In purchasing the land, you agree to uphold those covenants, no matter how inconvenient they are for you, (and often with harsh punitive measures stipulated for those who break them). For example, a deed may require that you build a home of a certain minimum size, (which would rule out your chances of owning a tiny house,) or instate that a mobile home cannot reside on the property, or that you are limited to specific materials. Restrictive covenants can even include what color your house can be, what kind of fence you can have, whether or not you can cut down trees, whether you can own a dog, and all kinds of matters. In some cases, bans are placed on solar panels or wind turbines, because they are “eye sores”. It’s also common to find that you are unable to build in a given area, or otherwise alter it, because it would block your neighbor’s viewing corridor, or something along those lines.
Assuming that you’re anything like me, you want to live in a place where you can do what you want, when you want, within reason. Make sure that you go over the details of a deed before signing and do some soul-searching to determine whether you can live with any restrictive covenants placed on a plot. Also, don’t treat the inclusion of restrictive covenants as am automatic deal-breaker for a contract. In many cases they are really quite reasonable, and there is often room to negotiate.
8. Know Your Easements and Right of Way Access
In the legalese of land deeds there are two turns of phrase that you need to look out for: benefited easements and burdened easements. Depending on how a plot is situated relative to a road or waterway, you may find that you and your neighbors will require passage over someone else’s property, and that’s what these clauses in a contract facilitate.
Should you have a “land-locked” neighbor, you may be required to keep a corridor open and available for them to drive across your in order to reach their own property, or through which they can transport a boat to make use of a boat ramp in a public lake. In this case, a burdened easement will be written into the contract for your land, insuring your neighbors have this right. The same may apply to utility lines, where burdened easements could give utility companies the right to dig a trench across your land in order to install water conduit, electrical wiring and the like. The nightmare scenario would be if you planted your garden right across this access corridor, and it gets destroyed by machinery when your neighbors decide they want high-speed internet. While you’re at it, be aware that the structures and other features of your home are likely to be required to stand a minimum distance from public roadways and your neighbors’ property lines.
Conversely, if you are the proud new owner of a piece of “land-locked” property, you will want to ensure that you will be able to access it with your vehicle – don’t assume that you have it. Some contracts limit access to property by foot only.
Keep in mind these kinds of easements are very common and par for the course when you’re buying land, particularly in a rural setting. Chances are, most any deed will include some form of easements and guarantees of right of way access to someone, somewhere, somehow under some circumstances. The important thing is to understand how these easements will impact your ability to use a given piece of land, and consider those impacts when making your final purchasing decision.
Similarly, it is possible that others could have access to your land in ways that you don’t expect, or that your behavior may be regulated by local interest groups. In western cattle country, for example, it could be forbidden to catch rainwater, because local ranchers have already called dibs on the rain that falls on your property so that they can water their herds. Those same cattlemen may also have the right to graze their herd on your property, much to the distress of those fruit tree saplings you planted and everything else you were hoping to grow – they may even have rights to cut your fences, if you try to keep them out.
7. Make Sure You Have Road and Utility Access
Similar to the point above, you will want to be sure that a piece of land has the potential for roadway access and utility upgrades, if they aren’t already present. What the local country folk regard as a traversable gravel road in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, (as long as it hasn’t rained in a few weeks and there isn’t twelve feet of snow blanketing the ground,) may be a far cry from what you are expecting, if you’re accustomed to living in a city with well-paved roads and civic engineers that clear the major thoroughfares of ice in the wintertime.
Unfortunately, there are some places in the country that simply will never get access to high-speed internet, good cellphone reception, or trash pickup – at least not during the lifetime of anyone reading this article. Make sure that you have a realistic sense of what services you will be content to live without, if you plan on buying a spot for your tiny house way out in the sticks.
6. Consider the Topography
Size, shape, orientation, slope, elevation – all of these factors are crucial in determining how a plot of land can be used. Property on a steep slope might be attractively priced, but whatever savings you manage in the initial purchase of land might be later consumed by having to adjust the gradient sufficiently to hold a level home without the risk of erosion undermining the foundation. Additionally, peculiar plot shapes sometimes arise, depending on what natural features are present on a piece of land that has been subdivided. A weird polygon might severely limit where you can place your home and other features you want to have. You may also face challenges with gardening or producing solar electricity on a north-facing slope, for instance.
5. Examine the Soil Composition
Depending on where you plan to locate your home, you may face challenges stemming from the substrate underlying your plot of land. On the gulf coast, you may find that the water table rises for six months out of the year and turns your little piece of coastal heaven into a mire of quicksand. In the Midwest, it may be that there is so much clay in the soil that it’s all but impossible to grow anything in. In the desert, it could be that you have to dig halfway to China in order to install a functional well. Glacial stone deposits in the northeast might mean that you need to hire contractors to come out and remove sizeable boulders before you have a spot big enough to put your house. When you’re considering a piece of land, make sure to spend some time chatting with the locals to get a good sense of how the local soil composition affects their lives, especially if you have your heart set on using the land for a specific purpose.
4. Observe Your Local Climate
Drought, flood, snowfall, tornado season and the like are all potential threats to your lifestyle choice on a given piece of land. Depending on where you live in the country and how you plan to use your property, any one of these meteorological phenomena could become the decisive factor in whether you decide to live in that location. Flash-floods may mean that you’re trapped behind a low water crossing for a few days at a time and unable to reach your job in town, or that the pizza delivery guy isn’t able to get to your front door. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live up to my eyeballs in freezing, slushy snow for ten months of the year in upstate New York; or generally anywhere in Oklahoma, unless I had a trusty storm shelter nearby when the twisters touch down, but to each their own.
3. Learn What’s Happening Nearby
Airports, railways, military bases, garbage deposits, electrical power plants, manufacturing facilities, factory farms – all of these kinds of industries are likely to have a sizeable impact on their neighbors, be it in terms of noise, foul odors, smoke and other fumes, or even just high levels of traffic on your local roadways. Before you sign a contract, make sure that you can live with the local industries that will surround you.
My friend Daniel learned this lesson the hard way, after he purchased a small homestead in the Eugene, Oregon area. One of the principle local industries is grass seed farming, which may sound harmless enough to those who don’t suffer from grass pollen allergies, but in Daniel’s case, he landed in the hospital a few months ago with severe respiratory complications. Unfortunately, poor Daniel has had to sink much of the savings he earmarked for house construction into paying to live in a hotel while he waits for his land to sell, because he simply isn’t able to live on his own property.
2. Meet the Neighbors
You can pick your spouse, you can pick you friends and you can even pick your nose, but you can’t pick your neighbors. If you move in without doing your homework, you may be unhappy to learn that the co-housing community next door is fond of 3 a.m. drum circles every night, or that the paramilitary white supremacists across the street have erected a watch tower so that they can peer through your windows to make sure you aren’t a government agent planted to keep tabs on them, or that the religious cult leader down the way who can’t wait to add your teenage daughter to his harem of devoted wives. (More realistically, you may live next to someone with free-roaming dogs that want to make a hobby of chasing your chickens around.)
The folks who live in the middle of nowhere often do so because they want to get away from the standard social contract, and that’s true for the tiny house movement as well. After all, home owners associations, insurance companies, state building code regulations, and so many other factors often force us to live in sparsely populated areas in order to have an opportunity to enjoy the kind of tiny house lifestyle we want to lead. The other side of the coin is that this often results in us having to rub elbows with folks that we might otherwise try to avoid.
Fortunately, the countryside is mostly full of friendly, wholesome people who make splendid neighbors. (I happen to reside near a community of Mennonites, who have proven themselves to be valuable friends and allies time and time again when troubles arise for my neighbors, and I personally benefit enormously from the local Mennonite-owned general store, where they’ve decided to only charge the wholesale cost of goods sold on most of the items they stock as a service to the area.) Just be cautious about where you set down roots, because you may find that you clash with your neighbors.
1. Evaluate Land Prices Carefully
If you find a plot of land that seems like an impossibly good deal at face value, it probably isn’t. It could be that the land has been farmed long and hard, and nothing will grow on it anymore. Maybe the former owners are sick and tired of the four-wheeler enthusiasts constantly driving on the adjacent BLM land. Perhaps one too many meth labs have been busted in the nearby woods. In other words, whenever land is being sold at a rock-bottom price, it’s usually because no one wants to live there, for one reason or another.
Conversely, dropping a million dollars on an eighth of an acre in the Texas hill country might seem like a wise investment to those have the cash in hand to do it, until it’s discovered that the micro-local land prices are heavily inflated by close proximity to a nearby celebrity owned ranch, for instance. Those high property values are likely to fall in a heartbeat if and when that well-known actress decides to move elsewhere.
No piece of land should be evaluated in isolation, because it doesn’t exist in vacuum. Before you decide one way or another about buying a given piece of land, make sure that you compare it to similar plots in the area and verify that price points are similar. If a specific plot of land is priced considerably lower than its peers, it would be a safe bet to assume that there’s something wrong with it and you should start looking elsewhere. Equally, if the price for a plot is substantially above its peers, you wouldn’t be crazy to guess that you’re being gouged. (Of course, be sure that you’re truly comparing apples to apples.)
Again, the best place to find tiny house parking or list your tiny house property (courtesy of Tiny House Listings) is TinyHouseParking.com.
Now that you know the most important criteria to keep in mind when buying a piece of land to build your tiny home on, you’re ready to start shopping around online. Check out this article to learn about the seven best places to begin your search.