Getting land is always exciting and yes I know you said it is desert BUT, you need to do a bit more homework.
WHY are they selling? If the price is stupid good... WHY, thats a huge alarm bell there.
Is there toxic waste in the land? are their liens on the land? back taxes? is it solid bedrock 2 inches below the surface so nothing grows there? alkaline pools, . are there any flash flood planes that run thru it? What's around it. Are there any endangered species on it so you can't do a thing with it? How about old buildings, even run down ghost town crap...oh but now it's HISTORIC, so you can't knock it down, you can only fix it Back to orig specs.... Don't end up buying someone elses problems.
I almost got a killer deal on a building, until I found out, its on septic, which is leaking and was condemned, the city will NOT let them fix it because it backs up to a wildlife protected wetland. The owner of the property sub leases out from an uncle who lives in Saudi Arabia, the number to contact 'contact people' is disconnected.... bla bla. good luck suing when you get shafted. It'd have cost me 60k to run into the city's sewer main, thats just the sewage, you'd need city water, so run back with water now,how much was that??? didn't bother to look at that point.
Not trying to turn this into an 'all about me' post but to show that I almost learned a very bad lesson about land the HARD way, stupid things normal people don't think about... until it bites them. Please exercise due diligence.
aaron
Aw, thanks for your concerns! That was part of what I did. I dug into the county records, such that there are, and checked the plat map. Also got the most recent google maps satellite imagery. Can confirm, no previous structures on the property. No previous wells dug or septics buried. Electric at the property line, but we're likely to go solar.
Owners bought it years and years ago, probably for a pittance, but ended up retiring to Florida instead. Property sat undeveloped, alongside it's seven identical sister properties that are also undeveloped. It's an hour from the largest town in the area, and almost half an hour from any gas station or grocery stores. Mesquite is considered a pest out here, so nobody wanted to touch it, or live that far from town/the oilfield proper. It's outside the Permian Basin proper and for some reason no one likes to commute. Despite a perfectly good state maintained highway. Property has perfect access to that highway, butts right up to it.
It's just wild land. Probably a larger ranch subdivided at some point when the land was no longer fit to graze cattle, aka taken over by mesquite which outcompetes the native grasses if you let it. And this stuff is all at least five to ten years old by the growth stage. Possibly much older. I won't know until we get it and start clearing out some.
We are absolutely getting it surveyed. And we insisted on going through a title guarantee company and they're going to pay for it. Then we checked out the title guarantee company with a third party realtor to make sure it was legit.
I have also viewed the topographical maps of the area. The property sits at a high point, above the 500 year flood plain for the river, three miles away. It is ten feet above to be specific, which in this giant, flat, nothingburger is actually impressive.
Largest possible concern is brackish/nonpotable well water (which we already have at the rental and we filter through RO). We won't know till we dig and send off for a test, but if the water is bad, we've got ways around that. Like our RO system, lol.
More tomatoes are getting ripe on the cherry tomato plants. We still don't have a frost in the forecast.
