Owning RV Land – Our One-Year Anniversary

It’s our first anniversary of owning RV Land in Tennessee and we are amazed at the progress we’ve made in developing it.

We’re also pleasantly surprised by how much we’ve come to love the land and the Mid-Tennessee community of Linden. Our five acres are in a development called The Woodlands of Buffalo River just outside Linden and not far from the beautiful and wild Buffalo River.

So in Episode 424 of the RV Podcast, we thought it would be fun and informative to give you an overview on what our first year of owning RV land in Tennessee has been like and answer some of the more common questions we get.

You can watch the video version of the podcast on our RV Lifestyle YouTube Channel below.

You can listen to an audio-only version on your favorite podcast app or by clicking the player below:

Owning RV Land in Tennessee: How it started

Our property at the Woodlands at Buffalo Rover

It started as a story. In the late summer of 2021, we heard about a large parcel of Middle Tennessee that was being sold to RVers for camping or building or whatever they wanted to do with it. These were big parcels - starting at five acres and going up from there into hundred-acre-plus properties.

This was unusual. While individual lots have been sold in campgrounds and RV resorts for decades, finding virtually unrestricted large land parcels with no hard and fast land use rules about having to build a permanent structure or prohibiting people from long-term camping was extremely rare,

So we went down for a look. Here's a link to the first story we did on owning RV land on that first visit.

They were selling, at the time, the first phase of the development, something like 1,500 acres. We borrowed an ATV and drove all over the land.

We were really impressed. The land was beautiful and wooded, with access to nearby rivers and lakes, and it is just 90 minutes west of Nashville in a recreationally rich area known as “Nashville’s Big Back Yard.”

We literally sold ourselves on it.

Our own story sold us!

The sunrise view from our private RV spot in the Tennessee woods

Little did we expect that the result of that story would result in us owning RV land! But it did. We loved the area. It was wild and remote, yet very accessible. Back at our Michigan home, I published the first blog post and pretty much immediately called the developer, asking if we could come back down and look for land ourselves.

The truth was, like many RVers in these post-pandemic days, we had become fed up with not being able to get a campsite or, if we did, finding the campground so crowded that it was very hard to enjoy a wilderness camping experience anymore.

If we owned RV land, we reasoned, we'd always have a spot to go to any time we wanted.

Right after Thanksgiving, we were back down.

From our research on the story and studying maps back home, we narrowed our search down to four different parcels and inspected each of them. In all, we spent three days on-site, walking all over each parcel.

We liked all of the four properties we looked at. But it was a five-acre parcel marked as site 25 that stood out the most. We asked and got permission to spend the night on it in our RV.

That was the one we decided on. It fronted the road and is bordered on both sides by a series of small ravines called hollers b...