How Long Did We SEARCH FOR LAND Before Buying A HOMESTEAD?

One of the more commonly asked questions we get is about how long it took us to find our land. After all, everyone wants their land to be perfect and making a poor choice in this matter can effect you tremendously for years to come. So what then does a buyer to do when they're searching for that perfect homestead and the process seems to forever drag on?

First off, Steemit already has an amazing homestead community and many of you already have your land and are working to make it that perfect little homestead that you can enjoy. The purpose of this article is to share on other social media platforms where we have many other followers who don't yet have a homestead. This post will hopefully open them up to Steemit where the homesteading community is growing and growing fast. Here, they can find all kinds of helpful information for their journey.

To begin, when we left the city in 2012, we joined up with a landowner in the Ozarks with the idea of sharing his land. The plan was to form up a community of sorts and have gardens and livestock and we could all share in the duties of that lifestyle. That turned out to be a disaster. So please don't attempt to make that same mistake. In fact, afterwards I did more research and found that 99.9% of all these community/land sharing attempts fail. And the 0.1% of community/land sharing communities that do not fail have so much turnover that they might as well be considered failures.

FINDING THE HOMESTEAD

So after that 10 month long fiasco, we heard from a friend about 56 acres for sale about 2 hours away and we left to check it out. We had a certain few ABSOLUTE requirements we wanted to have met for a homestead. These were non-negotiable.

Good water and plenty of it.
Low regulations/zoning
Good housing site
Internet access available

Notice that this is not a very long list. If you have a long list of ABSOLUTE requirements, you will never find that perfect spot. Everyone's perfect requirements are going to be different as we all have different ideas about what we want out of our homestead. We wanted good plentiful water so we wouldn't have to rely on the local water municipality. Low zoning and regulation was a must so that we could build the homestead however we wanted. And we wanted housing sites that would be easy access. And finally because I can work online, we wanted some sort of internet connection.

The first three were met with no problem. The land came with two 19th century wells dug back in the 1850's and supposedly never went dry. Zoning and regulations were no problem and there were a couple of nice housing sites on the property. I was told however that internet options like DSL or Cable did not exist in the area but many people used satellite. I've heard of the horrors of satellite but decided we would just have to make the best of it because so many other requirements were met. And having satellite didn't fail us as an ABSOLUTE requirement even if it wasn't my preferred method of connecting to the internet. Amazingly, after talking to the neighbors, we could get the slowest speed in DSL. It would be slow but wouldn't be capped like most satellite services.

That is our story on how we searched for our land.

What you want to keep in mind as you make your list of absolute requirements for your land, is that if you don't make this list and keep it short, you will drag on and on and on. You will look to find that one piece of land that fits your list and it will never happen! There is an old saying, "Aim Small, Miss Small".

It means to make your target on your target small so that if you miss, you still hit the target. It applies to shooting marksmanship but really can apply to anything in life. So when making a target for searching for your homestead land, aim small, miss small. Keep the list of absolutes short so that you hit your target and work on the other stuff later.

It is horribly disappointing to keep searching and searching and searching and never pulling the trigger on a land buy because you have too many expectations and requirements.

Make a list of absolute requirements
Keep the list short (aim small, miss small)

And then when you find that piece of land, pull the trigger and get going.

Keep in mind that readers coming to this article may be searching for land right now or getting started in thinking about homesteading. If you are a Steemit homesteader, add your comments below as they will most assuredly help others. And if you are a homesteader on Steemit that has written an article on this topic, paste that below to so that others coming here will find it!