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Not sure why you got downvoted -- land is cheap, you can easily find land for sale for $500 and acre or even less. But buildable land with utility access (whet

Not sure why you got downvoted -- land is cheap, you can easily find land for sale for $500 and acre or even less. But buildable land with utility access (whether municipal utilities or septic/well) that's in a place where people want to live is harder to find and that makes it valuable.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Hmm. What about buildable land without utility access? You need water, but you could have a purification system and a septic system. You need electricity, but you could have a solar system and a backup generator. You need heat, but it could be electric or propane. Seems to me someone could make a fair amount of money by creating the package to make it reasonable (not just possible) to live on "unusable" land. Oh, and this is a site that has a lot of people looking for startup ideas...
- Johnny555 5y ago
  Electric seems like the easiest problem to solve, a solar+battery system will work pretty much anywhere. A purification system only helps if you have access to water somewhere. If you have to spend $30,000 drilling a well, and your poor soil means your septic system costs another $20,000, And you've got to build a $30,000 solar battery system on top of that, well then your "cheap" land is not so cheap and you could have just spent more money on the land in the first place. Even if you have groundwater on your property, don't assume that you'll be allowed to use it, the water rights may belong to someone downstream. In some areas, you can't even harvest rainwater on your own property. Lots of people solve these problems and live in undeveloped areas without utilities, but I'm not sure there's huge demand for living full time so far from civilization that there's not even electricity available. And many of the people that do live there, are happen doing the work themselves, and putting up with the limitations. The people that want to buy a package system are probably the people that want all the comforts of home in their off-grid cabin, which means it's going to be expensive, just getting a well driller to drive 10 miles up a curvy unpaved mountain road is going to be expensive if they can do it at all.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Hmm. What about buildable land without utility access? You need water, but you could have a purification system and a septic system. You need electricity, but you could have a solar system and a backup generator. You need heat, but it could be electric or propane. Seems to me someone could make a fair amount of money by creating the package to make it reasonable (not just possible) to live on "unusable" land. Oh, and this is a site that has a lot of people looking for startup ideas...

Johnny555 5y ago
Electric seems like the easiest problem to solve, a solar+battery system will work pretty much anywhere. A purification system only helps if you have access to water somewhere. If you have to spend $30,000 drilling a well, and your poor soil means your septic system costs another $20,000, And you've got to build a $30,000 solar battery system on top of that, well then your "cheap" land is not so cheap and you could have just spent more money on the land in the first place. Even if you have groundwater on your property, don't assume that you'll be allowed to use it, the water rights may belong to someone downstream. In some areas, you can't even harvest rainwater on your own property. Lots of people solve these problems and live in undeveloped areas without utilities, but I'm not sure there's huge demand for living full time so far from civilization that there's not even electricity available. And many of the people that do live there, are happen doing the work themselves, and putting up with the limitations. The people that want to buy a package system are probably the people that want all the comforts of home in their off-grid cabin, which means it's going to be expensive, just getting a well driller to drive 10 miles up a curvy unpaved mountain road is going to be expensive if they can do it at all.