If you’re looking to buy land to build a custom home on, we can help you with that. You can trust our nearly 17 years of expertise—we’ve seen all kinds of lots: good ones, bad ones, and awful ones. One of the biggest challenges in finding the right land to build on is making sure you don’t have runaway costs associated in preparing the land to be built on. There are many potential challenges in site selection that the average homeowner might not know if he or she has not purchased raw land in the past.
For example, there are several things that can affect the overall “buildability” of a lot of land, including:
- Soil conditions. The occurrence of expandable soils (sometimes called “expansive” soils) can require expensive mitigation such as an over-dig and adding soil amendments. Discovering large boulders or solid bedrock near the surface can also add tremendous costs and require blasting with dynamite. High water tables can require helical piers or other additional mitigative measures.
- Ease of drilling a well. If difficulty is encountered in drilling your well, this can result in needing to drill deeper than normal, or if the GPM flow (gallons per minute) flow is too low, you might need adding additional cisterns to store the water.
- Difficulty of installing a septic system. Occasionally, site conditions can require an engineered septic system, which works very well and can solve your problem, but also results in unexpected costs.
- Proper placement on the lot. Sometimes people forget that the actual placement of the house on your lot is a very important decision, and requires consideration for egress in the case of fire, and ensuring that you won’t have to build a lengthy (and extremely costly) driveway.
- Access to utilities. Are you going to be living off grid? If so, how will you accommodate for power and water to the home? If you intend on connecting to utilities, are there actual utilities nearby that are willing to connect you to the grid? Sometimes you’d be surprised at how expensive this cost can be if there aren’t already utility hookups on site.
Here’s a lot we recently scouted out for a client. It was a challenge, but we built on it!
These kinds of questions (and more) are the things we generally look for on a site visit. For the right client, we can accommodate a site visit where one of our professional and experienced team members can meet you on the land you want to buy. For more information, contact us with the information on the land you’re considering, and we will contact you to see if we can help you acquire the perfect lot to build your dream home on.