Creating Access for Land (LA 784)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:                   Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:                            Hi.

Steven Butala:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. When I can talk.

Jill DeWit:                            When you can talk.

Steven Butala:                   I'm Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:                            And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny southern California.

Steven Butala:                   Today Jill and I talk about creating access for your land. Access, access, access.

Jill DeWit:                            Last time I checked-

Steven Butala:                   Can you think of other topic that causes more confusion and more discussion than access?

Jill DeWit:                            I was gonna. I was gonna, think I was going in a different direction. Can I, if I think of anything more important?

Steven Butala:                   No, I can't.

Jill DeWit:                            Access of all the four As, which we should talk about here in a moment, I think that's probably one of them. I mean, for me that might be number one.

Steven Butala:                   It is number one for me.

Jill DeWit:                            Okay, thank you.

Steven Butala:                   It's the first thing I look at on every single deal, including really serious urban properties. A lot of times there's no access to urban properties.

Jill DeWit:                            Sure, I don't care how gorgeous it is, but if you can't get there, it doesn't do you any good.

Steven Butala:                   So we'll talk about it in a second here. Before that though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit:                            Brandon asks, I have a larger parcel that I'm buying, and on Google earth it looks like there's really old dirt road to the property. It looks like it is overgrown-

Steven Butala:                   Oh, this is perfect.

Jill DeWit:                            And would be hard to drive on.

Steven Butala:                   Perfect for the topic.

Jill DeWit:                            I'm wondering if it would be worth the money to pay someone a few hundred bucks. I'm not sure how much it costs, to clear off the road and make it more accessible. The overgrown road does connect to a county road, so I think it would be pretty easy to do. Just not sure if it's worth the money to have someone do it before I try to sell it. Would this add value and has anyone ever done this?

Steven Butala:                   This is a great question.

Jill DeWit:                            Love it.

Steven Butala:                   And it's perfectly timed for this-

Jill DeWit:                            Episode.

Steven Butala:                   Yeah. This topic, so I've done this. I have bladed, it's called blading roads in. You know, those big huge Caterpillars with the blades on the bottom. That's what they use these for, grading. So in this case, if you have determined that, here's the problem with looking at Google Earth and seeing that there's a road there. That's really good news, that's actually passes my first test. Can you use the property?

Jill DeWit:                            Right.

Steven Butala:                   The second thing is if it's a valuable piece of property, I check the plat map to see if there's little dotted lines which are platted easements,