10 things to consider when buying a land

 
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In the fall of 2017, we started searching for lands. Our starting search parameters were 5+ acres, within the 3 hour distance from Toronto, a source of water, lots of trees, ideally close to Algonquin Park under $100K.

Soon after we learned that judging a land is really not like judging a house. At a house you can kinda estimate the costs, and conditions of the place. But in a land we had no clue as to what to take into consideration except for the visual beauty and our gut feeling. There was also not many options out there.

But as we looked around and did our research we got more specific:

These are the 10 things we considered:

  1. Size: More than 5 acres barely provides privacy. if you want to be completely isolated look for 20+ acreage

  2. Water: No bogs or wetlands which is a very common feature in Ontario. Still-water means lots of bugs. Also wetlands are usually environmentally protected so you cannot fix it up.

  3. If you choose to have water on your land; make sure it doesn’t smell. We saw this amazing property with a beautiful creek flowing between the large boulders but it was coming from a large bog; so every once in a while where was a wisp of stench that we couldn’t stand.

  4. South facing. Sun is the primary heating for a passive house. Make sure the building site has a full south exposure. It is also nice to wake up to a sunny landscape.

  5. Rolling landscape is great but not too many steep hills. Opening a road is tough business and if you need to use a lot of filling or breaking rocks it’ll be very costly.

  6. Lots of trees / not a farm land. This was our personal preference. In general open areas provide great advantage for solar and wind power also saves considerable amount of time during building process. But it doesn’t give you the same privacy or the magic of being in the wilderness.

  7. No electrical substation, landfills or uranium mines nearby. If your building site is away from the grid and you want to pull a line; an average cost for pulling a cable under ground is 2K per every 100m. A minimum solar system will cost an average of 10K. Building it at least 400m away from the road made sense to invest in the solar power and get off the grid for good.

  8. Up to 20 minutes from the nearest town - with shopping, a hospital & a school - with a year-round road.

  9. Zoning is a whole other story. we ended up looking for rural/residential zoning. It allows us to build one main dwelling and 2 supporting dwellings. Check your local municipality’s website for their zoning bylaw before making a decision. See link on the side.

  10. Make sure you have the ownership of trees and natural resources on your land. This is called lumber and mineral rights.

    In May 2018 we found the land we currently own and paid 85K for 45 acres with rural/residential zoning at Bankroft Ontario.

 
 
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