Finding Land to Buy the Old Fashioned Way First let me thank you for subscribing to the Build Your Own Home Newsletter. My goal is to give you helpful advice on topics that will help you Build Your Home and tips on Home Building in general. The topic of this newsletter is Finding Land to Buy the Old Fashioned way to build your new home. I know we are all accustomed to doing things the fast way using the internet, searching for listings thru realtors, newspapers and other mass media forms but in some situations it is a good idea to slow down and do things the old fashioned way. What am I talking about? Let me give you a little background. My wife and I have been talking about building a vacation home for some time and recently we started searching for land. So what did we do? You guessed it; we fired up the computer and started searching for land. We did find some property that we were interested in but found it to be too expensive and found out that many of the properties had different restrictions that we did not like. So I tried a novel concept that I am sure I mentioned on other pages of Build Your Own Home. The concept is actually mixing with the local natives in the area and asking questions. Since we are looking in an area that has very sparse population it was pretty easy to engage the locals. My wife and I went to different restaurants and stores and such and started talking to the locals in the area about how we were considering buying land. We ran into a couple of local businesses owners in the area that knew old timers that were considering selling some of their property to raise money. These owners do not want to deal with a realtor and are not technology savvy, so they are looking to divide up their land and sell it to individuals. This is a great way to find land that you can buy at a discount, but be very careful to make sure you have a clear title and insure that you have the proper paperwork. I would suggest using a local lawyer that is familiar with the area to make sure all the paperwork is in order. It is also a good idea to buy title insurance just in case there is a problem. If you are going to finance the property the bank will require title insurance anyway. This little tidbit may prove to be helpful to those of you just getting started in the home building process or for those of you considering building another home for whatever reason. I will keep you posted on my progress, and of course when we start to build I will take many pictures to share the process. | 
