How to Buy Raw Land Without Getting Burned

Raw land is the easiest real estate to buy and the easiest to buy badly. There is no inspection contingency, no appraiser, no lender quietly checking the work on your behalf, and frequently no agent on either side. Whatever nobody verified, you own.

The failures are not exotic. After enough transactions the same seven show up over and over, and every one of them is discoverable for free with a phone call before closing. Here they are, in rough order of how expensive they are to discover afterwards.

1. Access that is not legal access

This is the big one. A parcel can be physically reachable — there is a road, you drove on it, your tires are dusty — and still have no legal right of access. The road may cross private property under nothing more than a neighbor’s long habit of not objecting.

The distinction matters because a landlocked parcel is close to unsellable and close to unbuildable. Counties will not issue a building permit without legal access, and the remedy, an easement by necessity, is a lawsuit.

What to do: ask the seller in writing whether access is deeded, and get the recorded easement’s book and page number. Then confirm it at the county recorder. “It’s off a county road” is a claim about the map, not about your rights. If the parcel fronts a county-maintained road directly, that is the cleanest answer there is — verify it against the county’s own road inventory, not the listing.

2. Zoning that does not permit what you plan to do

People buy land with a specific picture in mind: a cabin, an RV on weekends, a shipping-container workshop, livestock. The zoning designation on the listing is a code, and the code means different things in different counties.

The particular trap is that camping and RV rules are the most volatile part of rural county code. Counties that were permissive five years ago have tightened after enough complaints, sometimes with a permit requirement, sometimes with a hard cap on consecutive nights.

What to do: call the county planning or land use department, give them the APN, and describe exactly what you intend to do. Not “is it residential” — say “I want to park a travel trailer and stay in it three weekends a month.” Write down the name of the person who answers. This call is free and takes ten minutes.

3. No water, and no realistic path to water

Off-grid buyers usually accept that there is no well. What surprises them is that they cannot necessarily drill one.

In much of the arid West, water is a separately administered right. In Colorado, for instance, a domestic well requires a permit from the Division of Water Resources, and permit availability depends on the basin and the parcel’s history. Hauling water is a legitimate answer that many rural residents live with, but it needs to be a decision, not a discovery.

What to do: ask the state water authority whether a domestic well permit is available for that parcel, and ask neighbors or the county how deep local wells run. A 200-foot well and an 800-foot well are different projects by an order of magnitude in cost.

4. Septic that will not perc

A conventional septic system needs soil that absorbs water at an acceptable rate. Rock does not. Heavy clay does not. If the parcel fails a percolation test, the alternatives — engineered mound systems, vault privies — run from expensive to permanently limiting.

What to do: ask whether a perc test has ever been done and ask the county environmental health department what they typically see in that area. On a parcel where you intend to build a permanent dwelling, consider making your own perc test a condition of closing.

5. Back taxes, liens, and a deed that conveys less than you think

Tax-delinquent land is sold constantly, sometimes by sellers who acquired it at a tax sale themselves and whose own title is imperfect.

The deed type tells you what is being guaranteed. A general warranty deed warrants title against all defects, including ones that predate the seller. A special warranty deed warrants only against defects arising during the seller’s ownership. A quitclaim deed warrants nothing at all — it transfers whatever interest the seller has, which may be none.

What to do: ask which deed you will receive and get it in writing before you pay. On a quitclaim, or on any purchase large enough to hurt, buy a title search or close through a title company. On a cheap cash parcel a full title policy may cost a meaningful fraction of the purchase price, and that is a real tradeoff — but it should be a tradeoff you made deliberately.

6. HOA and covenant obligations nobody mentioned

Many Western subdivision parcels — the platted 5-acre grids sold by the thousand in the 1970s — carry recorded covenants and sometimes an active property owners’ association with annual dues. Covenants can restrict building materials, minimum square footage, RV occupancy, and outbuildings.

What to do: ask for the recorded covenants (CC&Rs) and the current dues amount. If the seller does not have them, the county recorder does. Dues that are small are still an obligation that runs with the land.

7. Boundaries that are not where the map shows them

Parcel lines in a county GIS viewer are a drafting aid, not a survey. They are routinely off by tens of feet and occasionally much worse. Fences are built where it was convenient, not where the line is.

What to do: treat GIS as approximate, always. If the exact boundary matters — because you are building near a line, because a neighbor’s structure appears to encroach, because access depends on a corner — pay for a survey. It is the single most useful few hundred dollars on a parcel you intend to build on.

The pattern underneath all seven

Every item on this list is answered by someone other than the seller: the county recorder, the planning department, the state water authority, environmental health, a surveyor. The seller’s job is to tell you what they know. Your job is to confirm it with the office that keeps the record.

A seller who resists that — who is vague about the deed, who cannot produce the easement, who would rather you did not call the county — has told you something important. A seller who hands you the phone numbers is a different kind of seller.

We publish the county GIS and assessor links on every parcel page for exactly this reason. Use them. If something on one of our listings turns out to be wrong, we want the correction more than we want the sale.