Large Acreage Deals We are Doing Now

Jack Butala: Large Acreage Deals We are Doing Now. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.

Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit: Welcome to today.

Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about large acreage deals that we're dealing, right now. It was a highly requested show for some reason.

First, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com, online community, it's free.

Jill DeWit: Cool. John asked, "hey guys. I read again and again that subdivisions and their respective POAs/HOAs," those are home owner's associations, "are no good, and to avoid. Is there a way to determine if a piece of land is or isn't in one? Would you just look for a legal description without a subdivision name? Should I really be avoiding HOAs?" All good little questions.

Jack Butala: There's like three questions in here Jill, but can you just answer the big basic one first? Should you avoid HOAs or POAs?

Jill DeWit: Not at all.

Jack Butala: That's what I think!

Jill DeWit: No, it doesn't scare me at all/however you want to go in with your eyes open. You want to know, what are the fees, so you can properly advise your buyer. You want to make sure you don't have ... You're not buying one that has 500 dollars in ... Or whatever it is. You just need to know if there are any back fees that are due on it because when you buy a new property, you don't get to start from zero. If there's some back ... Just like back taxes, if there's some old HOA fees that are carrying over from the former owner, you get those. You just want to make sure you go in with your eyes wide open on that.

Jack Butala: There's no way I can improve on that answer.

Jill DeWit: Thank you very much.

Jack Butala: It's treated just like taxes.

Jill DeWit: Yeah exactly.

Jack Butala: You have to call around. The easiest way is just call around and find out if that subdivision's got an HOA. They're very, very not common. The properties, they're ... I mean, I can list probably six or seven subdivisions around the country where I know they have HOAs, and then ... I'm almost never surprised by, "oh my gosh, that, I didn't check, that one didn't have one."

This question ... This person's new and that's awesome, it's a good question, but you might not want to just worry about it too much. Just check.

Jill DeWit: Yeah, just know what you're doing. To find out, an easy way to do it, is call the county and you can quickly ask them, "hey, this is Southwestern Estates, is there an HOA?" You can even do that as you're looking at it. Google "Southwestern Estates", or whatever it is, and you'll probably find the association. Their webpage will probably pop up, a lot of them are ".orgs" I've found. One little nice tip, if you're ever buying bulk stuff like that, in an HOA, it is not crazy to talk to them about negotiating the back fees on an HOA.

Jack Butala: Yes, all those fees, unlike taxes, are all negotiable.

Jill DeWit: You can actually call them and go, "look, I'm buying 10 parcels in your area, talk to me. What can we do to get these guys back on track."

Jack Butala: Yep.

Jill DeWit: Good question.

Jack Butala: Intertwined, was on the last question, would you just look for a legal description without a subdivision name? No, there's no way to tell, as far as I've ever seen. No way to tell whether or not there is an HOA associated with a piece of property in a legal description. The vast, vast majorities of subdivided properties do not have HOAs attached. You don't want to just look for properties that are unsubdivided. You're going to miss a ton if you do that.

Jill DeWit: You'll miss a lot. We'll buy them all, but you won't catch that.

Jack Butala: That would truly be tragic. You'd be leaving a ton of property out.