>>2262200ahhh, land out here is actually pretty cheap. But god damn if you want to build anything on it. anti-development, militant greens have taken over county planning departments and banks refuse to loan money for bare land purchases
example: lane county OR; we purchased a 3.8 acre lot for just shy of 60k (it's next to our current house, so whatever, we bought it to prevent someone else down the line from getting approval to build) no real interest in developing it, just keeping it as a mini forest.
But that parcel of land:
We could not get a loan from any bank; so we had to take out a HELOC to raise the cash.
it's zoned f2 (impacted forest) so to even get a building permit there would be an additional permit (CUP - conditional use permit) that takes about 18 months to get through the county -- pre-covid, i'm sure it's longer now. once approved it's valid for 4 years, with an optional 2 year extension.
meanwhile building permits are valid for 2 years (off the top of my head, regardless -- they aren't valid for too long)
so if your plan is to buy some land and build your own house, you have to complete it within a year or two (i.e. get it up to code) and do it all out of pocket. Oh, and you can't live on the land without yet another permit while the house is being built.
>it's absolutely stacked to make development as difficult and expensive as possible.Our land/house we bought a few years ago, thankfully it already had a CUP on it, so we were able to get right down to it; and get a construction loan for the land purchase and house. But with that, the bank's terms (and these are pretty standard FYI) were such that from the time the money was dispersed we had 1 year to complete the build and do aconversion to a conventional mortgage.
other lovely strings attached to the construction loan:
>electrical service>septic approval>on site well1/2
