Is it Safe to Buy Land on Ebay?

Buying land on Ebay is just as safe as buying land from any other source as long as you do your due diligence. Regardless of where you buy land, you always want to make sure that you use competent professionals (ie. brokers, attorneys, title companies, etc.) to help you with your due diligence. Never buy land site unseen. Even if you have seen photos of the property. Pictures are worth a thousand words but pictures also lie. It is too easy to present a property in the best light and leave out glaring faults using pictures.

It is always best to physically inspect the property. You can always put land for sale under contract with contingencies for inspection, financing, and other diligence concerns such as environmental considerations, zoning, tax implications, etc. This is where having good professionals assisting you pays off. They are familiar with issues that might arise when buying land. Also, just because land is for sale and listed by a licensed broker dos not make it safe to assume that the property does not have issues that can cause you headaches or even legal issues in the long run.

When buying land, whether it s on Ebay, through a broker or through private treaty, always protect yourself by using competent professionals, doing your due diligence, and physically inspecting the property. If you follow these three simple tips you will save yourself a lot of headaches.

Best of luck and Happy Buying!

Why Selling Now is Not A Bad Thing

While this does not apply to all sellers, many sellers can take advantage of today’s market. Sellers who have high levels of equity are in excellent position to capitalize on the current real estate market. How, you say?

First you have to retrain your sellers to think differently. During the land boom sellers might get several offers and many times they would end up getting full asking price and sometimes more than asking price. As this became common place, sellers would turn down a lot of offers because they were seeing other sellers get full asking price offers and the property was not on the market very long. Now that we are in a down market sellers still have not changed their way of thinking. They are still turning down those initial offers hoping for that higher offer because they do not want to miss out by selling too soon.

However most times a higher offer never comes and they end up lowering their price and many times accepting an offer that is even lower than previous offers. Sellers need to realize that they need to capitalize when they can in today’s market because buyers are more scarce. Also, even though they may be selling at a lower price than they would have a few years ago, they will also be able to buy a replacement property at a lower price than they would have paid a year few years ago. Smart sellers can sell their property and then capitalize by purchasing land, farms, and ranches at significant discounts especially if you find a seller who passed on the first few buyers and now are anxious to sell.

Buyers have much more bargaining strength in today’s market. However, many of your would be buyers need to be freed of their fear to act so they can capitalize on the buyers they are able to attract and become buyers themselves to take advantage of the opportunities that are available now.

Fortune Magazine

LandBrokerMLS.com was just mentioned as a resource for those looking for brokers who can help them find Farmland to invest in. Farmland has become a hot land investment. Since the economic downturn, people have been turning to investing in land that can provide a return even in today’s economy. Let’s face it. We will always need food and with a growing world population we see an ever increasing demand for food. This makes farmland a good investment both short term and long term.

For more information on how people are investing in Farmland check out the June 22, 2009 issue of Fortune Magazine – “Why Farmland is Hot”

Learning to Work Together

Throughout my land brokerage career I have been and continue to be surprised by the number of brokers who choose not to work with other brokers. Whether that is sharing commissions, market information, or just plain good land brokerage knowledge. This doesn’t help our industry. The more we help each other the better our services will be and we as individual brokerages will never be able to lock up the entire market so why not help each other. We will be the better for it.

Land Brokers have an opportunity to work together and contribute in building tools and services that are valuable to them. Up to this point, brokers have allowed others who have no understanding of land brokerage to provide services for land brokers. Brokers in Colorado are beginning to understand that they have the power to influence these services by joining together and supporting the services that they find most valuable.

I feel that a Land MLS has been a long time coming and land brokers now have one to utilize. Without a concerted effort though, there will never be one “single” primary Land Broker MLS. It is time for land brokers to take advantage of their power and begin influencing the services that they value. Take the time to support services that support you. Visit Land Unlimited and find out more about the only “TRUE” Nationwide Land Broker Network & MLS.

Why You Need a Land Broker

The trend recently in the residential real estate market has been towards low, set fee brokerages such as Red Fin. Sellers have begun to push back against paying commissions based on percentages of the selling price. Sellers are not seeing as much value in working with brokers. Much of this is due to a large number of brokers going for the easy money and not providing much in return. No one can blame a seller for feeling cheated if they paid a $10,000 commission and all the broker did was put the seller’s property in the local MLS. However, there are excellent brokers out there who do far more and earn every penny of their commission.

This becomes even more evident in land brokerage. Land deals can be very complex and are full of possible pitfalls for both parties. If you are selling your land, farm, or ranch, or maybe thinking about buying a ranch or some land, make sure you enlist the services of a good reputable land broker.

Your needs will vary from state to state and all states have different factors and laws that impact land transfers and land usage. Below I have listed factors that your broker should be experienced in and have knowledge of:

Real Estate Contracts
Water Rights
Easements
Forest Service Permits
Bureau of Land Management Regulations
Mineral Rights
Wind Rights
Boundary Disputes
Riparian Law
Grazing Permits
Leases
Surveys
Title Commitments
Well Permits
Oil & Gas Leases
Conservation Easements
Highest & Best Use Determination
Wildlife Management
Ranch Management
Farm Management

A broker who is knowledgeable in most of these areas and others will be invaluable. You just never know what will be encountered in a land deal and a land broker has seen a good many scenarios while working on previous land deals. Brokers will not catch everything but they can save you a lot of time, money and headaches.

When you begin your search for a land broker, talk to several. Find out what their background and experience is. Absolutely do not just flip open the local listing magazine and call the broker with the most listings without doing any due diligence.

Best of luck and if you are looking for a broker, give us a call. We can refer you to some of the best brokers across the nation. (970)389-3010 Land Unlimited

Cooling Texas Land Market

The Texas land market is beginning to show signs of cooling. In the second quarter of 2008, land prices failed to exceed 2007 2nd quarter prices. Ranch land sales fell 30% from 2007 levels and commercial land sales fell by even larger margins.

There are also signs of buyer resistance to seller asking prices and the buyer sentiment appears to be they feel they are buying at the top of the market. Sellers seem to share that sentiment and are electing to list their properties at today’s high prices.

If the economy continues to drag on the Texas land markets, land prices may stagnate or worse begin to decline. This may also lead to investor dollars being trapped if owners are not willing to reduce prices to induce sales. This reveals one of the pitfalls of investing in land. Land is not an easy investment to liquidate like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.

If owners are highly leveraged, a slow land market coupled with a slow economy can wreak havoc on their finances. Unable to afford their land payments, owners may be forced to list their property. However, with a slow land market the property may not sale, forcing the owners to reduce their price; possibly to the point that proceeds will not be sufficient to cover debt.

This very scenario has been played out across the nation in the residential markets. In the land markets however, no one knows how highly leveraged owners are. Most likely there are a reasonable number of owners who are highly leveraged. However, if we look to history, most land buyers, especially large ranch buyers, generally had substantial amounts of money and either paid cash or were not highly leveraged.

This fact leads me to believe that most land owners who are  highly leveraged will be owners of small tracts in and around metro areas such as Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas/Ft. Worth. The one exception being the large tracts purchased by developers. With the residential slow down, developers will have to scale back and may not have the resources necessary to hold the land until markets improve.

Fortunately for Texas land owners, the Texas land market cooling occurred late in the economic slow down. The economy is showing signs that we may be at the bottom and could possibly see improvement by the end of 2009, beginning of 2010. If this scenario plays out, Texas land markets may be spared the brutal cycles that other markets across the nation have endured.

Source: Tierra Grande – Journal of the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M January 2009

The Ranching Lifestyle — Living the Good Life!

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE

November 26, 2008

This is the first entry in my blog about ranch real estate, hosted by Land Unlimited, the land broker network and MLS.

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Gary Hubbell, a Colorado native and ranch real estate broker. I live with my wife, Doris, and two boys, Reed and Jake, in Crawford, a small town in western Colorado.
There are reasons why we choose to live where we live and do what we do. Some of you like to be urban sophisticates, with a wide variety of choices close at hand—theater, fundraising balls, pro sports teams, shopping malls.
That’s just not my cup of tea, and it’s not my family’s, either. When you live the ranching lifestyle, you choose to forgo those urban amenities, and you simplify your life. We didn’t choose this lifestyle because we like to be the first ones in line to buy the new i-Phone or Wii or whatever new creation is cool and happening. We chose it because of more satisfying events.
I’ll give you an example. Two days ago, my wife and I were walking our dogs (we have four Labradors and a Brittany spaniel) when I noticed movement from my neighbor’s property. One cow appeared, then another, and ten more, until there were 70 cows moving up our driveway. Local rancher Monty Todd and his wife, Karen, were behind the cattle on horseback. My dogs, having been around cattle many times, didn’t even bark or look up. Monty rode over to us on a nice bay quarter horse.
“Do you want to help us move our cows up to Fruitland Mesa?” he asked. “I mean, there ain’t no money in cows,” he drawled, “so we might as well have some fun.” Doris and I looked at one another, laughed, and said, “Sure. We’ll saddle up and join you. Where should we meet?”
We arranged a meeting spot, and half an hour later, we were unloading two horses from our trailer and mounting up to join the cattle drive.
Monty and Karen lease a ranch about 12 miles from town on the west end of Fruitland Mesa. It’s a good place to winter cattle, as it’s protected from wind and weather in a canyon that gets a lot of sun. If you’ve ever followed a bunch of cows up a quiet country road, it’s a great way to chat with your neighbors and get to know the countryside in a manner that you just don’t experience when you’re zipping by in a car.
Several of the neighbors came out to block their driveways, preventing the cows from making their way into the farmyards and hayfields, and we got to visit with them as we rode along. Every time we passed a ranch with horses in the pasture, the herd came galloping up to greet us, tails flying, as the exciting event of cattle, horses, and cow dogs passing by their quiet domain enlivened their morning. Ranch dogs came out from each place to look over the scene, and fortunately they were all well-behaved.
Karen’s mother, Kay, joined us, riding Monty’s quiet gelding, and she admitted that she hadn’t ridden a horse for several years. I couldn’t tell—she sat the saddle well and she and Karen looked like two peas in a pod. Kay made a point of reminding me that I had called her an “old dog”, which I certainly couldn’t recall. I flushed with embarrassment. She laughed. She had been the secretary at the elementary school, and I had asked if the school had a website for its calendar. She said she knew nothing about computers, and I said, “Oh, I bet we can teach an old dog some new tricks.” So I guess I did say that.
Doris and I like to ride with the ranchers whenever we can, because it’s a great way to put miles on a young horse. Doris was riding Walt, a bay appendix quarter horse gelding and a grandson of the famous racehorse Dash for Cash. Walt needed some miles, and the experience of moving cows was good for him. I rode Sherman, our biggest horse. Sherman is half Thoroughbred and half Percheron, and a wonderful horse. He got wringy every time Walt and Doris got some distance away from him, so I got a chance to school him about not being buddy-sour, as the condition is known. He actually worked cows pretty well for such a big horse—16.1 hands and about 1,400 pounds—and he got a nice sweat going as we moved down the road.
After five or six miles of trailing the cows, I knew I had some phone calls to make to keep some real estate deals moving, so Doris and I bid adieu to Monty, Kay, and Karen, because they still had another six miles to go before they got to the ranch. We turned our horses around and jingled back to our truck and trailer, moving them along in a crisp trot along the borrow ditch. Not quite 45 minutes later, we were loaded up and ready to go home.
Doris agreed to take the horses back to our ranch to unsaddle and turn them loose, and I stepped back into the office, refreshed and envigorated from my morning of playing hooky, and feeling great about living the ranch lifestyle.

Are you A Real Buyer?

One of the most difficult aspects of being a real estate broker is qualifying buyers. We live in a world that is dominated by information exchange, via text messages, websites, podcasts, and cell phones. It’s easy for someone to sit at a computer in an anonymous room somewhere and fire off emails to inquire about fulfilling their dreams. Who knows, the email I just received asking me to locate a Colorado cattle ranch for an interested buyer could have come from Attica or San Quentin.

My goal as a ranch real estate broker is to provide great value for my services. I get paid on a commission basis, and I start at “zero” every month. My time is valuable. Therefore, I need to work with people that are truly serious about buying real estate–people who have the resources and commitment to sign on the bottom line when I’ve located the kind of property they’re seeking. Although I do list properties for sale, I find it most comfortable to work for buyers. I like researching properties and finding what my buyers want. It allows me to travel across Colorado and the West, and I like learning about new landscapes, property owners, and local customs and business practices. Consequently, most of the properties I’ve researched are listed by other brokers. I act as a buyer’s agent, representing the buyer’s side in the transaction. Imagine going into a courtroom to defend yourself in a lawsuit, and using your opponent’s lawyer to represent you as your legal counsel. That’s similar to buying property from the listing agent, who has a fiduciary responsibility to best represent the seller’s interests.

So imagine this scenario: I get an email from someone, let’s say “blanketyblank@yahoo.com”. “Gary– Please send me information on Colorado cattle ranches for sale. Jim.” I write back: “Jim, Thanks for writing, I’ll be happy to work with you on buying a Colorado cattle ranch, and I have several good ones in mind. Please give me your complete contact information and more information about what kind of a ranch you are seeking. I need to know your budget and your financial qualifications, and preferred locations, animal unit carrying capacity, and climate that you prefer. After we identify a couple of good properties, I may ask you to sign an exclusive buyer’s agency contract. Gary”. Jim goes away. I never hear from him again.

Put yourself in my shoes. You get an email from someone who doesn’t identify himself at all. He asks you to go to work researching multi-million-dollar properties at considerable expenditure of time and expertise. He doesn’t agree to provide his financial qualifications, and he doesn’t agree that he won’t just go contact the listing agent to see if he can knock my commission off the top of the deal. Why should I work on that basis?

Of course, there are other clients that are really top-notch, and they understand these factors and provide me with their financial background, reasons for wanting to acquire a property, time frame to work with, and a budget they’d like to spend. Awesome! I’ll go right to work with someone like that.

The anonymous email scenario works its way out pretty quickly, but the difficult buyers are the ones that stay somewhere between “real” and “not real”. “I’m waiting for a $30 million inheritance from my long-lost uncle,” is a good one. If that’s the truth, then you won’t have any difficulty providing me a copy of the will and the contact information for the executor of the estate, right? Or perhaps the probate court? No? Once the inheritance comes through and you “get real”, we’ll go to work finding a ranch. Another one is “I’m working on behalf of a very wealthy individual who doesn’t wish to be identified.” Well, I can keep a secret. I’ve dealt with more billionaires than you ever knew existed. If you want me to sign a confidentiality agreement, send it over and I’ll sign it. If you’re not a licensed real estate broker, you have no business conducting yourself as one, do you? Turn the buyer over to me and we’ll get a deal going. I can’t waste my time researching 10 ranch properties for your secret buyer in Missouri or New York or wherever, with no guarantee that I’ll even get a phone call when he decides to go look at all the ranches I’ve just disclosed to him.

In the course of buying a ranch or farm property, there are a lot of details that must be tended to. Well reports, easements, inspection deadlines, appraisals, mineral rights, Forest Service permits, grazing allotments, FSA156 reports, conservation easements, building envelopes, shared irrigation agreements, brand inspections–trust me, I’ll earn my commission. As your buyer’s agent, I may also save you as much as my commission by negotiating a better deal on your behalf. It can take hundreds of hours and months of time to conclude a large ranch purchase.

When you get ready to purchase farm or ranch real estate and ask a broker like myself to go to work for you, don’t be offended if he asks you some personal questions first. He’s just trying to see if you’re “real” or not, and you should be flattered that he’s taking the time to qualify you as a buyer before dedicating his talent and expertise to your goal of buying a farm or ranch property. You can read more about buyer’s agency by visiting my website, www.aspenranchrealestate.com.

Hunting Resources

As one of my favorite sports, hunting holds a special place in my  life. I would rather be hunting than doing just about anything else. Over many years I have found numerous resources that I find very helpful when planning hunts and and reading about other hunts.

My best overall resource would definitely have to be The Huntin’ Fool, www.huntinfool.com. As a memeber you receive all their issues which during the draw period covers each of the western states giving you draw odds, state rules and regulations and recommendations. You also have access to some of the best hunters in the western states. I never have to worry about missing a drawing deadline as I receive a Huntin’ Fool issue at least a month in advance. The Huntin’ Fool also offers an application service in the event you prefer to have someone else submit your applications for you.

Some other resources that I find very helpful are:

Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/

http://www.mytopo.com

National Rifle association – http://www.nracom

Eastman’s Hunting Journal - http://www.eastmans.com/

 

I hope you find these resources as helpful as I do. Go luck in 2009 draws and hunting seasons!

Wind Rights

The wind farm industry has been booming over the last few years and now with T. Boone Pickens pushing it is growing even faster. As a landowner, there are many aspects to consider prior to entering a lease for wind production. Wind leases vary and have substantial differences from mineral leases.

Some of the  more important considerations that should be addressed in a wind lease are – horizontal severance clauses, vertical severance clauses, and surface rights.

Landowners need to negotiate both vertical and horizontal severance clauses to prevent one tower from capturing the entire premise from the surface to the heavens. This would be similar to a depth clause and a Freestone Rider in a mineral lease. Since wind does not blow equally at all elevations and generally wind has a greater velocity at higher altitudes, landowners need to make sure that the lease prevents loss of future wind production royalties by restricting the area both horizontally and vertically for each wind tower much in the same way mineral leases provide for each oil well.

In wind leases, there is no automatic right to use the surface, whereas; in mineral leases the lessee has the automatic right to use as much of the surface as necessary for exploration and production. Landowners need to make sure to address whether they will want to restrict certain activity or impose monetary penalties for certain activities. Some activities that landowners may want to limit or impose penalties for are tower sites, construction sites, roads, transmission lines, guy wires, substations, buildings, loss of use of surface, and loss of revenues.

Landowners will also want to consider indemnification clauses, time is of the essence clauses, and property tax consequences. Consulting with an attorney who is familiar with wind lease is highly recommended as all leases require different clauses and will need to address issues specific to each property and lessee.