Option payments covered the whole carry on 47 acres for seven years

The ag valuation doing the work here is worth saying louder. Your effective carry was $240. Mine on a similar sized parcel two counties over is $2,600 because I let the lease lapse for one season and got kicked off the ag rate, and the rollback rules where I am look back five years. Anyone copying this needs to read their state's ag or timber valuation statute before they close, and then keep the qualifying use going every single year without a gap.

Also the unreleased lease is the most common thing in the file that nobody looks at until a buyer's lawyer does. It cost you four months at the exact moment you had a live buyer, which is when time is most expensive.

So the thing that made this survivable was that it wasn't actually income-less. $900 hay lease plus $3,525 of option money. That's not much money but it's not zero either.

I came into land assuming the whole hold is a hole in your pocket. Is a hay or grazing lease something you can generally arrange, or did that come with the parcel?

Dumb question, if the option had expired unexercised, do you keep the $10,575 they paid over three years or does any of it come back?

Keep it, that's what option money is. It buys them time and it's yours whether they use it or not, subject to whatever the option document says, which is the whole point of reading it before you sign.

Canton, the substation distance is the part I want to push on. A mile and a half with spare capacity is a specific fact you knew. Did you know it in 2018, or did you find out in year five when they knocked?

Following on hollow's question, because the answer changes what kind of post this is. If you knew about the line in 2018 you bought a solar candidate and got paid for it. If you found out in year five you bought a growth path bet and got bailed out by a use nobody was underwriting in 2018.

Both are fine. They're just not the same skill.

Running the numbers as a capital allocation rather than a story. $201,200 in, $423,000 out, seven years, plus roughly $10,575 of option payments and call the hay a wash against taxes. That's somewhere around 11 percent a year before whatever the tax treatment turns out to be, which is a question for a professional and varies by how the option and sale get characterized.

11 percent with zero operations and one four-month scare is a good outcome. It's also seven years of $200k I couldn't touch. For me the question isn't whether 11 is good, it's whether I'd have found something better for that money in 2018 and I genuinely don't know that I would have.

Canton, what did the fringe growth line actually look like as a document? A comprehensive plan map, a utility service boundary, something in a capital improvement plan? I'm building a list and I keep finding parcels that feel close to something without being able to point at the paper that says so.

The part I'd want to know before copying any of this: what happens if the developer walks in month 30 of a 36 month option and the substation capacity gets eaten by somebody else's project? You're back to a raw pasture bet at year seven with the same growth line and two years of your buyer pool gone.

Not saying it's a bad outcome. Saying the version of this thread where that happened doesn't get written and I want to remember that.

$3,800 in closing and survey on a $197,400 purchase. That's the number I came for, because every land post I read skips it. Was the survey the bulk of it, and did you need a new one again for the sale?