2.5 acres bought online in a subdivision where the road was never built, out $9,100 over three years

I got within a week of the same trade in a 1970s plat out west. What saved me was calling the county road department and asking one question, is this road in the county maintenance system. Answer was no and never had been, and the guy on the phone said it in the tone of someone who says it forty times a year.

That call is free and it takes six minutes.

Who's on the other side of these listings? Is it mostly the original developer's successor still selling off a 1979 plat, or investors flipping the same lots to each other?

Running your numbers. $8,900 in, $3,240 out, and $3,445 of dues, assessment and taxes over three years. The purchase price loss is $5,660 and the carry is $3,445.

The carry was 39 percent of the total damage on a three year hold. On a ten year hold at the same run rate you'd have spent more on dues than the lot cost. That's the number I'd want a beginner to see, because everyone underwrites the purchase price and nobody underwrites 3,650 days of $525.

POAs on old rural plats behave like small HOAs with worse records and no management company. Dues are usually enforceable as a lien against the lot under the recorded declaration, and in many states that lien can be foreclosed, which is how these things end up back on the market. Enforcement varies by state and by what the declaration says.

The practical version: assume the dues follow the land, assume they can go up by vote, and read the amendment provision to see how many owners it takes to raise them.

What is a POA exactly? Is that just an HOA for land with no houses on it?

Ember, close enough. Property owners association, created by a recorded declaration when the subdivision was platted, binds every lot, collects dues, in theory maintains common stuff like roads and gates.

Juniper, I'd push back on your own diagnosis a bit. The declaration would have told you the dues existed. It wouldn't have told you the lot was unsellable. The real problem is you bought into a market where the only buyers are other people buying sight unseen off the same website, and the moment you needed a real buyer there was exactly one, the neighbor. You found the price of that pool.

The road was the excuse. The buyer pool was the loss.

$2.1 million across 140 lots for a road and a low water crossing is not an unreasonable number, which is the depressing part. Crossings on a seasonal wash need engineering and permits and they hold up the whole schedule. Once you're carrying a structure the per-mile cost stops looking like grading and starts looking like a bridge project.

That plat was drawn in 1979 by someone who assumed lot sales would fund construction. Sales happened. Construction didn't. There are hundreds of these.

Five months on the market with zero offers is the whole story and everything else is commentary.

I own two of these and I stopped buying them in 2021. Mine are in a better plat, county maintained gravel to the lot line, dues $180. They've gone up on paper and I've never tested it with a sale, which means I don't actually know what they're worth.

Juniper at least got a real number. Mine are a number on a website.

Did anyone ever perc test in there, or run a well? On the jobs I've been on, the thing that kills these old plats after the road is groundwater. If the lots that did sell can't get a septic permit the resale market shrinks to people who want to camp on it.

$12,345 tied up for three years to come back with $3,240. The dollar loss is one thing. The other is that $12,345 had to be sitting somewhere doing nothing else while you waited five months for a buyer who turned out to live two lots away.

Small enough to survive, expensive enough to remember. That's probably the best version of a first mistake.

The declaration is the document, and I'd add the plat itself and any recorded amendments, because dues escalation and assessment authority usually live in an amendment rather than the original 1979 text. Pull the whole chain from the recorder, not a summary from the seller.

One caution on how you'd get it. Most states put recorded instruments in the county land records and many counties have them online now, but roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all and some counties still make you show up in person or pay per page. Whether the POA has to hand over minutes and financials on request depends on your state's association statute, and some of those statutes only cover residential associations with dwellings, so an unbuilt land POA can sit outside them. Ask a local attorney if the association stonewalls you.

Paying $1,200 for a study that told you the thing wasn't going to happen is the most honest fee anyone's ever charged you. Everything else in the deal was optimism.

What happens to all the lots in there where the owner just stops paying dues? Do they end up at a tax sale, or does the POA take them?

Wren, both, depending on who moves first and what the state allows. County takes them for delinquent taxes eventually, POA can go after the lien in some states, and a lot of them just sit with dues accruing against an owner who died in 1994.

I look at these plats constantly because they're the cheapest thing in my market. The ones worth anything share a short list of traits. County maintained road already to the lot line, not planned. Septic permits actually issued to neighboring lots. A POA with money in the bank and no litigation. If the road is "planned" in a document written before I was born, it's planned forever.

Juniper, you paid $9,105 for a filter that a lot of people pay more for.

Same shape as a bad rental where the rent looks fine and the operating cost is the whole story. $525 a year on an $8,900 asset is a 6 percent annual expense against zero income. I wouldn't buy a building on those terms and I don't know why raw land gets a pass in people's heads.

The answer is that land feels like it has no operating cost, so nobody looks.

Added to my checklist from this thread: county maintenance status by phone, recorded declaration plus all amendments, last three years of POA minutes and financials, whether a septic permit has ever been issued on that plat, and a name of one person who would buy it from me if I had to sell in six months.

That last one is flint's point and it's the one I would never have written down on my own.