Held 18 acres nine years, and the exit was decided in year two

@warrant recorded boundary line agreement, both signatures, in year three. Cost me a bottle of something decent and $400 in legal work. The option did let them file, and I had approval over the application package, which I used exactly once to strike a request for a density that would have killed my price if they walked and I had to resell entitled but odd.

The weed abatement notices are the part people in my line of work see constantly. Two rounds in nine years on 18 acres is light. Around here the county will mow it for you and lien the parcel at a rate that would make you laugh, and the lien sits there compounding until somebody notices at closing. If you're holding raw ground more than an hour from where you sleep, find a guy with a tractor and pay him once a year before anyone sends you a letter. It's $400 to avoid a mess.

Nine years of paying taxes on something that sends you nothing is the part I can't picture. I'm about to have one rental and the whole appeal is money arriving monthly. How did you actually budget the carry, did you just pay it out of your other deals as it came, or did you set aside the nine years up front?

@wren I set aside four years at close and then it became a line item I stopped noticing. Honestly if I'd had to plan nine years of it up front I might not have bought. The bill was $50 a month at the start. That's the strategy's trick and also its trap, the carry is small enough to ignore and long enough to matter.

My parcels are 90 minutes further out than yours and there is no funded trunk line in any document anywhere, because there's no district to fund one. Everything is well and septic and will be forever. So your whole thesis mechanism doesn't exist in my market. What I have instead is price, $900 to $1,800 an acre, and the appreciation driver is people leaving cities for cheap acreage rather than a builder assembling lots. Different bet. Slower, and I have no idea what my equivalent of your capital improvement plan is. Possibly broadband buildout maps.

Running your numbers against a duplex I bought the same year for about the same money. Mine has paid me and it's also cost me a roof, two turnovers, a water heater, and a tenant who stopped answering the phone in month fourteen. You got $221,000 of appreciation and nine years of nothing happening. I don't know which I'd choose. I know which one I'd have been able to do while my kid was small.

What if the extension had been cancelled instead of slid two cycles? Not delayed, killed, board votes to reallocate to a different quadrant. You're sitting on 18 ag acres at $4,200 with a market that just learned the pipe isn't coming. Do you sell into that at a loss or do you hold another decade on a worse thesis? I ask because that's the branch I keep hitting in my own analysis and I never like my answer.

@pike I hold, because I paid cash and $1,400 a year doesn't force me anywhere. If I'd had a note on it I'd have been selling into the worst possible bid. That's the real reason I stayed unlevered and I should have said it plainly in the post.

Can someone explain what a capital improvement plan is in plain terms? I've read this thread twice. Is it a public document I can just look at, and does every county have one?

@juniper it's the budget a city, county, or utility district publishes for physical projects, roads, water lines, sewer, over some number of years. Usually public, usually on the website, sometimes only in board packets you have to ask for. The important part is that the near years are funded with identified money and the far years are wishes. Availability and format vary a lot by state and by how small the jurisdiction is.

4% on the sell side to the broker who called you once a year for five years seems like the cheapest part of this deal. I'm getting licensed and that's the business model I'd actually want, a list of raw parcels in a growth quadrant and a phone call every twelve months. Did you ever consider listing it publicly instead, or was going direct to the builder always the plan?

@halyard never listed. Builders in that market were assembling and a public listing would have priced me against retail acreage buyers, who pay less per acre than someone who needs my 18 to make their 140 lots work.