Buying Rural Property - A Buyers Checklist to CYA

[Parks 788]

Question for all of you regarding buying tracts of land in OK. The info I'm looking for is this. When buying a "regular" property with a home on it and an acre or two is different than a 60, 120, 180 acre tract with no dwellings on it. The former I can handle with some basic knowledge I have with home inspections, termite inspections, specific pluming inspections, etc.

However, when buying tracts of land is there a checklist of what inspections, checks and verifications that we as buyers should always be aware of when purchasing land? I would hope that my realtor/broker would have this knowledge and my best interest in mine but we want to make sure our representative is doing their due diligence on our behalf.

I want to start a list of what we need to do on our end to make sure what we buy meets our needs and doesn't have any unknown restrictions, regulations or issues we find out about after the purchase.

-Mineral Rights
-Easements
----For Oil companies, etc
-Pipeline, oil/gas running through property
-Flood Plain
-Existing or Nearby Utilities
-Well Depth
-Septic Systems
-Insurance coverage for Rural Properties
-Land Use and Restrictions
-
I'd probably be willing to hire an individual separate from our real estate broker that assist with these kinds of varifications. Please opine with your experience and knowledge on purchasing rural property and what you think are the items to be checked and double checked for area of Creek, Osage, Okmulgee, Tulsa and surrounding counties in OK. Thanks for the responses in advance.

 

[GlockPride]

Good luck buying right now. I know a ton of properties are accepting cash offers and offers that have no inspection clauses. Even houses are generating offers and gaining traction due to buyers not demanding inspections.

 

[Okie4570]

Step 1 is make sure your check is bigger than the Chinese lol.

 

[okcBob]

It’s a sellers market, like with cars. I’ve been looking too & a few times by the time the realtor returned my email, the property already sold. I don’t have enough knowledge to make a fast decision in order to beat out other interested buyers.

 

[cowadle]

stop by the fsa and check for gov contracts such as crp etc. if your going to farm it or not you need to look at the soil map too. with the reinstatement of the wotus coming back and the executive order to idle 30 percent of farmland you should at least consider. and of course look at the improvements and the taxes. ask for a warranty deed. check to see if it has ever been indian land.

 

[filbert]

Access to the land, preferably a county road. Anything else is a problem.

 

[Preacherman]

Make sure that the deeds are up to date and do not have any leans against them. It can be very expensive to have them brought up to date. If there are pages missing it is $5 per page. If the owner does not have the deed then one must be made @ $5 per page.

 

[Preacherman]

Where are you looking and how many acres will you buy?

 

[cowzrul]

I have purchased and sold larger pieces of land a few times in the past 4 years. I would not put very much faith in realtors knowledge of raw land deals. Aside from what you posted above I look for:

Access or multiple access points
right of way agreements
and around Oklahoma county -- sandstone. Don't overlook the type of dirt you are buying. January I looked at 10 acres off of Henny and 29th. Multiple pockets of sandstone, neighboring sewage pond maintained by MWC, and an old commercial well that previously serviced a trailer park. Somebody will buy it but it wasn't going to be me.

 

[SoonerP226]

If you’re planning on building, you primarily want to pay attention to water, access, and easements. The easements will be filed at the county courthouse, and I’m pretty sure they have to include any easements on the property, including any pipelines that cross it (gas, oil, or telecom—someone I know has an old oil pipeline running across his property that Chickasaw Telecom bought to run fiber through).

I was told that it’s not legal to sell landlocked parcels in Oklahoma, but I recently saw a parcel for sale for pennies on the dollar compared to surrounding land. In the details it said it had no access easements, so I guess that’s one more thing to add to the checklist.

For water, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) regulates water wells and septic systems, and they have a pretty robust online GIS system showing the locations of registered wells and so forth via their Web site. You can also look for rural water districts to see where they have water pipelines; I know Pott, McClain, and Creek counties have RWDs, but I’m not sure how you’d find info on them aside from going into one of the district offices.

It doesn’t hurt to ask about mineral rights, but those were severed from most properties’ surface rights in Oklahoma long ago, so I wouldn’t be overly concerned about them at this stage of the game.