How We Found Our Land

Kyle Cato - Co-Owner, Associate Broker

Apr 05, 2021

We ended up getting a contract on our house so quickly that we really didn’t have a lot of time to look for property. I had envisioned a process where we would list our house and have several weeks or months to be able to find the perfect tract of land. We would surely be able to find one that suited all of our needs and I would be able to get it for a great deal. Full disclosure, I’m the broker here at Carter Group Real Estate. We specialize in selling land. Because of this, I may have been slightly overconfident in my ability to locate a property so quickly. Thankfully, God had a plan in mind for us that was better than anything I could have imagined.

What were we looking for?

We had a pretty specific set of requirements for the land we were looking to buy. They were as follows:

10-20 acres
Relatively close to town
Wooded property for extra privacy
Good road frontage
Access to utilities
Mostly upland
Pond or creek frontage
In a certain area of the county preferably
High speed internet access

To be honest, I knew that some of the things on this list were going to be really hard to find. We would probably have to make some concessions. This is something that I, as an agent, am used to dealing with. All of my clients have a list of things that they are looking for in a property. I pride myself on being able to locate a tract of land to meet their needs. I have done this many, many times over the years. Unfortunately, the one time that I needed to do it for myself, I ran into a hiccup. That happened to be a combination of the time crunch that we were on and a lack of inventory in our local market.

How did we find it?

It was 96° outside with high humidity, but that didn’t stop us.

Of course, the first place that I went searching was in our own listings. I went through them all and looked for any that met our needs. It’s been a really great year in the land sales business. Unfortunately, that has left us low on inventory, so I didn’t find any. I then went to the websites of the other agencies in town. Still no luck. I pulled up all the major land sales websites, one at the time, and searched using our criteria. Nothing of interest was available there either. I made phone calls to several local agents to see if they knew of anything. Nada! It wasn’t looking good.

So, I did the last thing any self respecting land agent wants to do, I asked for help on facebook. Too ashamed to do it myself, I asked my wife, Megan, to make a post saying that we were looking for land. I could already imagine the comments that we were going to get. “Don’t you do this for a living?” “If you can’t find it, no one else can either.” The comment section didn’t disappoint. What everyone didn’t understand was that I had already exhausted the sources for listed properties in our area. I needed an "inside tip" on a piece of land. We needed help from all of our friends to find what we were looking for.

That one post on facebook gave us several leads on tracts that weren’t on the market. They weren’t officially for sale, but they might be willing to sell for the right price. I spent over a week following up on leads, going and looking at properties, and evaluating how each one met our needs. Each property met many of our requirements, but not all of them. There was a possibility that one or two tracts might come available that I really thought would suit our needs well. So, I decided to wait it out and see what happened. Over the next week, both of those properties ended up not being for sale. We were back at square one.

I went back to the original facebook post to see if I had missed anything. There was a comment on the post about a property that was owned by a family friend. I had discounted this tract as being too far from town the first time I read it. But by this point, we had already looked at several tracts that were further from town, so now it seemed perfect. I called our friend to see if we could take a look at the property. I had a good feeling about it, so I brought the whole family out with me to take a look. We walked the property for several hours and the more we looked, the more we liked it.

Was this the one?

This property was 19 acres.
It was located less than 10 miles from town.
The tract was completely wooded with 30 year old planted pines and large oak trees.
It had plenty of road frontage on a county maintained dirt road.
Power lines were located all the way down the frontage of the property.
The only portion of the property that was low was the eastern edge of the property where it went down to a branch.
There was a small pond site located on the property.
We loved the area where the tract was located.
The only problem that we could find with the tract was it didn’t have access to high speed internet.

As you can see from the list above, this property met almost every one of our requirements. It was the perfect size and was located in a great area of our county within a reasonable distance from town. We loved the privacy provided by the trees on the property, and it was down a very private dirt road with lots of road frontage. The tract already had a deep well, it just needed to be tested and have a new pump put into it. There were power lines all the way down the front of the property for us to tie into for power. The land was virtually all upland, with the exception of the eastern boundary where it met a small creek. A small pond had already been dug in the middle of the property at some point in the past. It was in the perfect location for us to be able to have a home on one side of the pond and my in-laws to build on the other side. The only knock against the property was its lack of high speed internet access.

High speed internet might not seem like that big of deal to most people that want to live in a rural area, but Megan works from home for a cyber academy and she homeschools our son. We had to make a decision if we were willing to give up our Xfinity internet account and see if we could find another solution. We looked into several different rural internet solutions and are confident that they will suit our needs. There are also several new technologies with a lot of promise for delivering high speed internet access to rural areas. Our governor has also signed several bills allowing rural electrical co-ops to begin to deliver high speed internet to their members as well as other means of delivering access. With a new push from our state government through the Georgia Broadband Development Initiative we are going to trust that over the next few years that we will be more than fine on that front.

In conclusion

With all of my knowledge of land sales and all the access that I have to properties for sale, I still was unable to locate a listed property in this market that met our specific needs. I’ve been able to do this for many clients through the years, but when I was on a tight deadline and needing it for myself, I couldn’t make it happen. It took the help of our friends to be able to find the perfect tract. I’m so thankful to everyone that helped us on our search. We were given so many leads and people were willing to offer us part of their properties. I was beginning to worry about finding a property that would work for us, but God blessed us with the perfect piece of land. We‘ve got lots of information to share with you about this property in the future, so stay tuned.

If you are looking for a property to purchase, please know that we will search just as hard for you as we will for ourselves. I have a talented group of agents here at Carter Group Real Estate, and we will do everything in our power to find you the perfect piece of property as well.