With the wacky weather the world seems to be experiencing in recent years, I always make sure it's not in any kind of flood plain. We bought at the top of a hill so water wouldn't be an issue. After about 2 FEET of rain in July alone, I'm feeling good about our decision.

I'm not a big fan of restrictive HOA's, or communities that charge outrageous permit fees. A friend of mine paid $66,000 in permits and fees. That's about half the total budget for our build!

I assume you've checked the usual things like having an airport, sewage treatment plant, or other potentially obnoxious properties nearby. Our area has a decent GIS site, which enables you to check out a lot of things about the lot and the surrounding area. Search for 'XYZ County GIS' to see if your county has a site.

Might also check about zoning in the surrounding areas. Like if the land two properties away has been rezoned and there will be a slaughterhouse put on the sight.

Also check news stories to see if there are any weird stories about the area. (Meth house next door, etc)

Easements. Always check into easements. :)

Thanks everyone so far...

Gargoyle...how about a 6 lane highway a couple hundred yards away? That's why this property is still available after everything else in town is already built. It is a known "issue", and one that I'm prepared to put up with.

So far most of the points that have been brought up have been "you might not want a house here because", which are interesting and useful.

Mostly though, I'm hoping to hear more about surprises from some unexpected direction that literally prevent you from building after you've spent money on the lot. I don't want the lot to turn out to be just a very expensive picnic site. :)

Any chance anything is buried on the lot?

Has it ever had any sort of building on it?

Any new roadways planned for the area?

I only know of one person who bought land that ended up being totally "un-buildable." It was a flag lot and they bought it without doing the due diligence you are doing. Turns out local zoning wouldn't allow them to put a house on the flag lot and they couldn't get a variance. I don't remember all the details, but I do know they now own what is essentially that expensive picnic site you were talking about. :)

Other than that, lots of close calls...

There was one situation where the lot allegedly didn't have enough road frontage, even though it had the required acreage to be a building lot. That was a weird situation though - there was a seasonal road involved there that the house was going to face, but for some reason the county didn't want to count the road frontage on that seasonal road. That one did receive a variance, after some minor hassles and expenses.

Other than that, I know people who have had some unpleasant surprises about septic system designs not fitting on their lot. Or buying land not realizing the public utilities (water) are on the other side of the street. (Around here you have to pay for that hookup, which involves either digging up the road or boring under it....expensive either way!) Or buying land in a rural setting and not being able to hit water with their well drills.

I also know one person who spent a lot of money getting an old oil tank pulled out that no one had a clue was buried there. Lots of remediation involved, so again, lots of money.

If you have a 6 lane highway that close you might want to check the DOT easement width and location on your GIS. The highway easement could be a lot wider than the highway.
Also bear in mind it costs the same to build a house near a highway but the resale value may be less.

I once had an experienced commercial land developer pass along this advice to me: spend at least one full day, morning to evening, on the site and observe everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, etc. It takes a bit of patience and the right mental preparation, but I have found it to be a pretty good approach, especially when big $$ (or one's personal residence) is at stake.

I once had an experienced commercial land developer pass along this advice to me: spend at least one full day, morning to evening, on the site and observe everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, etc. It takes a bit of patience and the right mental preparation, but I have found it to be a pretty good approach, especially when big $$ (or one's personal residence) is at stake.

Totally agree about spending time there...and I even go one further and park my RV there and spend the night. That is actually very important.

One flip property that I almost bought turned out to have a very active drug dealer right next door. Place seemed very safe during the day, but as evening approached I started noticing a large amount of strange traffic. People would pull up to the neighboring house, beep twice, and then leave a few minutes later.

Needless to say, I didn't buy that one...and I ALWAYS spend a night there now before purchasing.

flgar..........66k in just permits and fees?????? Just curious......where in the world was that?

check the impact fees for your community. We found when were were about to get started on the build that the county had just passed an astronomical increase in impact fees. We had to get our plans in a super short period of time to avoid this increase and it was super stressful. We paid $3000 for impact fees, if we had missed the deadline it would have been $15,000. Impact fees are for schools, parks, libraries, roads. They are passed on to new builds because you are going to put an additional strain on these things by adding yourself to your new community.

We also have pocket gophers which sound like your weird rat that no one cares about but apparently if you have them you can't build. So we had to have a study done to prove we don't have them before we could build.

We had a wetland study before we purchased the property as that of course has tons of restrictions and we just learned that we basically need to finish the build within 5 years because they passed an even more stringent wetland requirement that would make our class of wetlands unbuildable within 500 yards though right now we can build within 50 yards of it.

We have an unbuildable lot nearby.

It is unusable becasue of the residential setbacks, and no variances are ever granted for it. Several owners have tried.

I second the impact fee comment - and all other fees , I am learning this the hard way right now

you need to check for :

- impact fee or Land dedication fee ( just found out I owe 9K)
- Make sure you know ALL the building permit costs , REVIEW and PICKUP - the latter is usually much bigger , for example I will pay 1100 for a review fee and a 6K pickyp fee
- Cost to hook up Electric and Gas
- Get a copy of the survery , take it to the city make sure you know exactly where your builable area is ( frontages etc ) , otherwise you will be asking for a variance like me . Even though my survey had a 25' setback , the village said that since I was the only property on a dead end there was different rules and I had to line up with the side of a house .

learn everything you can about what the setback rules are in your area , make sure to find every exception and ask the city if you might fall under one

Make sure that there was never an old gas station on the property.

In the old days, they just left the tanks in the ground and the soil became contaminated.

Not a good scenario.

Make sure you are happy with the building envelope, if there is one. Our neighbors bought the lot a few doors down and hoped they could get the envelope changed. When they couldn't, they abandoned all plans to build