Buying Land in a Complicated Housing Market

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Buying a plot of land and making a go of homesteading is a tantalizing dream for many. The idyllic notion of growing abundant gardens, raising small livestock, and living a simple life in a cozy home…what could be better??

For many, this dream starts with buying a parcel of raw land. Many available homes on the market are either too expensive, too close to neighbors, zoned against homestead activities like small livestock, or aren’t constructed with homestead activities in mind. They’re made for the wider world and, let’s face it, most of the wider world isn’t into storing home-canned produce in a large pantry or raising honeybees.

Believe me, we get it. Our own homestead dream started in a midcentury ranch house near an interstate. Back in 2014, we finally started looking for parcels of land and sold everything in order to purchase one and begin building our quirky little cordwood house.

We bought our land in 2015, built our house from 2016-2017, and had two solid years of living in it before the pandemic hit and turned the housing market on its head.

The market that we bought in no longer exists.

At the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people saw the perils of living in the city in close proximity to one another and decided to move out to the countryside. These everyday folks (along with investors and private equity) bought up land and rural homes at super-low interest rates and then stayed there as the market inflated and interest rates blew up.

The game has fundamentally changed. So what are you supposed to do if you want to create the homestead life you’ve always dreamed of?

First of all, don’t write it off completely. Just because the game has changed doesn’t mean you can’t play it. It just means you have to be a bit more creative and a lot more realistic about how to approach it.

So buckle up, because in this post, we’re going to examine some ways that YOU can still find land for homesteading AND pay for it in a housing market that’s gone haywire.

Jump to a topic:

The market that we bought in no longer exists.
Large Land Listing Websites
Local MLS Sites
Government and Private Auctions
Lots With Houses
Free Land?
Conventional Loans
VA, USDA, and FHA Loans
Land Contracts and Seller Financing

Finding Land Listings

It’s good to get an idea of what the market is really like in your chosen area(s). Even if you end up going a rather unconventional route like private financing or some sort of hyper-local homestead land offer, you need a basis for knowing what kind of land is available, what amenities exist there, and what a typical cost per acre is. Searching on listing sites is the obvious place to begin.

Large Land Listing Websites

Personally, I don’t feel like these are always the best places to find comprehensive listings for your local area, but I DO think they’re good for getting a feel for what kinds of land are out there. This is especially true if you aren’t tied down to a particular locale and can broaden your search a bit. I mean, if you’re a remote worker with no friends or family tying you to a particular location, the world is your oyster. The price per acre varies widely from state to state, so these websites can be helpful for learning more about what’s available.

Here are some options to choose from:

Land Sales List — huge listing of land sales websites organized by category
Land.com
Land and Farm
Landsearch.com
Land-Listings.com
Landlimited.com

Local MLS Sites

If you have a more defined area you want to search in, definitely check out your local MLS, or “multiple listing service”. Most real estate agents in a given area have an MLS search listed on their websites. These can range from totally free to completely paywalled, so be prepared to do a bit of digging.

Start by going to your search engine of choice and typing “[NAME OF AREA] MLS” or “[NAME OF AREA] MLS land listings” and see what pops up. You may have to scroll past some of the big websites listed above to find the more local outfits.

Choose one that looks promising and go to that website’s advanced search. Find options that let you refine your search for Land only (you may have to deselect options like Single Family, Condo, etc.) and specify the number of acres, price, and maybe even specific locations if you have options in mind. Here’s an example from my local area (town names blocked out):

If you know the more suburban and urban towns in the MLS listing, you might consider selecting all of the areas except those to make your search more productive if you want to be really really rural.

READ: Homesteading in the Suburbs or City

Government and Private Auctions

This one isn’t for everyone, but it can be a treasure trove for the right buyer. USA.gov has links to a variety of government listings. You can also try searching for “land auctions in [STATE NAME]” or “land auctions in [COUNTY/REGION]“. You will likely run into a range of public and private auctions. Some may be more legitimate than others, so be sure to seek information about specific auction outfits to make sure you’re working with someone reputable.

Be aware that many of these auction brokers will require you to have cash secured to complete the purchase in relatively short order. That could be immediately at the close of the auction or pre-auction bid period, or it could be within a set time period ranging from days to weeks. If you are someone who would need a mortgage or other financing to complete this purchase and you do NOT have the cash on hand, find out ahead of time what a particular broker requires and ensure you’re ready to pay when the time comes.

Lots With Houses

Don’t ignore lots with existing homes on them. Some of them may be servicable enough to live in while you build your dream home. Others may require a bit of demolition work before you can proceed. Either way, this is often a great way to get a high-quality piece of property with most or all of the major infrastructure work in place, like public utilities, septic, driveway/access, etc.

Truly raw land will need thousands of dollars invested in acquiring these necessities, but a property with an existing home may already have what you need. On the flipside, there can be costs with demolition or removing a home that could negate the cost of those utilities. Your potential costs will vary widely from property to property, so run your numbers.

You may also be able to reclaim materials from an existing house, even if it isn’t liveable. I’ve known several people who have been able to reuse old-growth lumber, mantles, doors, and more from a house that would otherwise have just been torn down. This requires a bit of sweat equity, but you can walk away with some really great materials if you decide to make a go of it.

READ: How to make sure your reclaimed and recycled building materials are safe

Free Land?

This is one of those things I see on prepper websites time and again, and yes can technically get free land in a few select places within the US. This website has a few such free land listings with links to each for more information.

Here’s the thing though: for most folks, these kinds of offers aren’t necessarily your best bet. IF these particular offers are still available when you’re looking, you’ll need to be in a personal and financial position to relocate to that area, AND be willing to adhere to their residency and building requirements.

Maybe that’s you, and if so, that’s great!

But if you’re like many of us who have family or careers tying you to a particular area, or you don’t like the idea of building a home where its design and use are dictated to you by the applicable local authority, then you’re probably better off trying for a more conventional piece of land and paying cash or using one of the following financing options.

Financing the Land (once you find it)

Once you’ve established that, yes, there is in fact land available for you to buy, and it might not cost both arms and both legs, you need to know how you’re going to finance it.

There may be some among you reading this who have the capital on hand to do a purely cash sale. If that is the case, go for it! There’s nothing like the feeling of owning your own place free and clear. But if you’re like the rest of us who have to get a little creative for our financing, read on. Here are some options to consider.

Conventional Loans

Traditional loans may be more obtainable than you think! We have our land loan through Rural 1st, which is part of Farm Credit. Our own personal experience working with them has been overwhelmingly positive. We originally purchased our land with a large down payment on a land loan and set out to build our house for cash as we went. When it became clear that we needed a small loan to complete the project, they met us halfway on a loan for the rest of the build and rolled it all together. They were super flexible and easy to work with (more so than when we tried to talk to our bank about it).

Specialists in rural properties are much more willing to work with homesteaders and country property buyers in a way that traditional banks and mortgage lenders simply aren’t. My experience when contacting traditional lenders about buying rural property was always more confusing, more expensive, and typically less open to dealing with raw land. That isn’t to say that every single lender is like that, but it is something you may run into.

Rural 1st is one of the larger rural lenders out there, but there are others, like AgAmerica. There may even be hyper-local options that you can tap into if you search your area, like state/district/county-level housing initiatives and organizations.

VA, USDA, and FHA Loans

If traditional financing is unavailable to you, your next stop might be VA, USDA, and FHA loans. These have a lower barrier-to-entry as they offer little to no money down and a low credit score requirement for low-income buyers. That said, these mortgages can be harder to find, the interest rate may be higher, and the paperwork hurdles can be significantly higher.

As for buying raw land, these types of loans come with an additional hurdle in that you MUST build a house on it within a certain timeframe. There are requirements surrounding this process too, which could be a no-go if you wanted to owner-build or simply have raw land for hunting and fishing.

You can start learning more about these options here:

Land Contracts and Seller Financing

Depending on how much risk you’re willing to assume, you might consider a land contract or owner financing. Put simply, this is an arrangement where the buyer makes payments directly to the seller, who retains the land until all payments have been made.

This can be advantageous if both parties are interested in avoiding real estate agent fees and other costs associated with closing on a rural property. It can also be a great option for folks who may not qualify for more traditional means of financing but who don’t have the funds on hand to do a purely cash purchase. That said, it can be an expensive and heartbreaking boondoggle.

Anyone looking to go this route needs to have a good lawyer on hand to help this setup go smoothly. You also need to do an abundance of research to make sure the deal is solid before you proceed. This includes things like determining where and how payments will be held during the payment period, interest charged (if any), who will pay for the eventual deed transfer, and much more.

These are some great posts from reputable outfits that can give you some more details and steer you in the right direction:

And of course, you can go down the rabbit hole reading other folks’ experiences on Reddit. This particular thread was worth a read, but there are many others.

How to Choose the Land That’s Right for You

septic field leach line with black pipe surrounded by dirt with a backhoe in the background

Whether you decide to stick to reasonably-priced properties and a conventional mortgage or search for land on Craigslist to owner-finance, knowing how to compare your properties and make an informed choice is critical.

It’s possible to luck out, as we did, and find a property with an existing driveway and a level building site basically ready to go. But more often than not, raw land requires some work before you can build on it. That may include building a driveway, moving soil for a septic leach field, prepping a level building site, running new utilities, conducting environmental surveys, and more.

Of course, you might run your numbers and determine that the cost of improving a piece of raw land is better or in other ways preferable to buying a pre-existing house. Or you may decide that the financials aren’t the only driver behind your decisions. It’s super important to get clear about your goals and priorities, not just with money but with your reasoning for buying land in the first place.

Beyond cost, there are so many other things to consider when you’re choosing where you’re going to create your homestead. Natural resources, building materials, emergency access, and proximity to medical facilities are just a few things you might consider as you’re weighing your parcel options.

I’m a big proponent of running multiple versions of your budget with different scenarios. For example, if you have one parcel that has a fallen-down house with power and water for $X and a totally raw piece of land for $Y, you need to really break those properties down to their potential costs (time AND money both). We have a few guides that can help you do just that.

Use this FREE PDF Land Buying Guide to help get you started

Email subscribers get access to this guide, as well as all of our other materials, in the Members Only Resource Library.

Go deeper in The Homestead Land Buyer’s Guidebook

I put this book together with the input of real estate agents and real homestead land buyers who graciously offered their experiences and expertise to go beyond our particular purchase experience. It has loads of helpful info and worksheets you can use. But more than that, the stories of real land buyers who have so many unique insights to share with you are absolutely priceless. I truly hope it makes your buying experience that much better.

Click below to purchase it on our Payhip store!

Buying Land in a Complicated Housing Market

The market that we bought in no longer exists.