Call out to Tennessee Farmers, I have lots of ???

MotorSeven · Feb 19, 2006

MrSteve,

Those that piped up about the neighbor thing are giving good advise. Last year, after deciding that my 32ac didn't have a suitable building spot, i got a wild hair and started looking aroung the area for another tract. Found 70ac bordered by a good sized creek on the long side, an old dam that i coulda hydro'd the whole house off of, and a nice flat top of the ridge building location. It is a gorgeous piece of land. The asking price was 1k an ac....hmmm...well it was going to cost quite a bit to get a road into it, but something else nagged at me. So, i went up there 3-4 times, and the last time i walked the entire property line. Saw a fellow in an adjoining pasture on a wheeler doing some deer stand work, so i walked over an introduced myself. He was a local guy that now lived 45min away and hunts the family property as much as he could. I listened more than i talked, but i did tell my intentions of retiring soon and wanting to build a modest home. We both hunt, so we spent quite some time talking about bucks and toms. He then told me about the guy that just got out of prison for pulling a gun on a kid that rode a wheeler along the creek....which meant that this knuckle head would be my neighbor for the tune of about 1500yards. There were rumors of dope being grown and other conflicts with this guy and other folks in the area.
Well, another fellow on a wheeler drove up and stopped. He was looking at the same tract, and was also a displaced local that owned a farm further up the creek. He was looking at the tract strictly for hunting. Believe it or not these two guys knew of each other but had never really met. After another hr of shooting the ----, the second guy starts telling more horror stories about the ex-con and all the equipment that has come up missing around his farm. We all had alot in common and i would have loved to have these two guys as neighbors, but the ex-con was a deal breaker.
Do your homework:

Check the US Census bureau for county facts.
Talk to the neighbors, but be humble.
Drive around the immediate area and look it over.
Make sure that building site is not on a northern saddle that won't get any sun in the winter(i think you can guess how i know that /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif).
Most TN creeks are capable of flooding during heavy rains, so building next to one is not a good idea unless you are above the high(flood) water mark.
Walk every inch of the property more than once.
If you are looking in a more remote area, remember, the locals have lived there since the 1700's, don't step on their toes and respect their way of life, they may not have alot of money but they are rich in many other ways.

Turns out that 63ac next to my original 32ac came up for sale so i jumped on it. My surrounding neighbors are friendly hard working people that have already helped me out(storing my new Kioti in their barn until i get mine built) with a few projects. I do not wish to drag suburbia with me, i wish to adopt their way of life with just a few slight modifications.

Oh, and one more thing, do not assume that a survey it the last word on property lines. Surveying is much more complex in the rural seting, and can frequently be wrong. If you do get one done, take a copy to your neighbors and double check with them that it is correct. This way you can avoid conflict after it is too late.

Sorry for the long post, but i wish i had known about TBN in '01 when i was buying my first tract.

RD

MrSteve · Feb 20, 2006

Thanks Slamfire, capt_met and MotorSeven for the replies! You both have given me very good info to work with.

Lets talk about the hunting thing and what I have told my wife. ME, I "LOVED" to hunt, but the wife has more or less said no to that happening anymore. That’s ok, I understand where she is coming from and after all I have two ducklings in the house right now that the mom duck left behind (she flew away and never came back). So the wife feels NO hunters on any land we could get, well that is a NO NO in my book when you 1st move to a new place with lots of land. To me that is looking for problems from people that could of hunted that land for MANY years. So she did agree with me “to a point” to SLOWLY stop hunting over a few seasons, I think that would be best to stop one of the many problems that we could be looking at.

Oh MotorSeven, IMO you had "good" omen by not getting the land you were looking at, now look what you have and you didn't have to move.

Slamfire, Thanks, but I really wouldn't want to be on a top of a hill and I do need alot of clear land.

SnowRidge · Feb 20, 2006

If you are going to allow hunting on your new land, be sure to check into the signage and liability issues. As I understand it, under Tennessee law you are protected from liability claims for injury from uninvited people( trespassers), but not necessarily from people with permission to be there. This somehow ties in with the signage requirements. There is a law here that requires specific terms on the no hunting signs. They have to specify that hunting requires written permission and (I think) the name and/or address of the land owner. There is also a specific requirement for the number of signs to be posted per property foot frontage.

It is all confusing at best, and no one in my area seems to have the proper signage, at least as I understand it. There are plenty of plain old no hunting or trespassing signs, though.

You will no doubt want proper insurance coverage. The Tennessee Farm Bureau if the largest property insurer in the state. We have a farm policy with them. Most of my neighbors are also insured with Farm Bureau. In fact, I can't think of anyone out here who has mentioned any other company.

Full disclosure: I aint no lawyer no how, and I aint never played one on TV, and I have been wrong before. /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif Boy, have I been wrong. /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

SnowRidge · Feb 20, 2006

Oh, and one more thing, do not assume that a survey it the last word on property lines. Surveying is much more complex in the rural setting, and can frequently be wrong. If you do get one done, take a copy to your neighbors and double check with them that it is correct. This way you can avoid conflict after it is too late. 

There are a lot of small survey operations around here. We tried to use one and couldn't get a hard commitment to do the job on time, so I bit the bullet and went with a large commercial company. It probably doubled the cost, but they got the job done.

We bought a title insurance policy that protects us from a bad survey, among other things. The title company would only accept surveys from companies on their approved list, and I can't emphasize this enough, no one told us this. We found out by asking. Had we gone to closing with a survey by some outfit not on the approved list, our title insurance would not have protected us from boundary errors. The title company required and retained two copies of the survey.

The closing happened to be done by the title company's local manager. She told us that the majority of closings involving acreage that she dealt with did not include surveys. She called the buyers idiots.

dmccarty · Feb 20, 2006

( The closing happened to be done by the title company's local manager. She told us that the majority of closings involving acreage that she dealt with did not include surveys. She called the buyers idiots. )

Does survey in this case mean recent? Why pay for a survey if the land is already deeded and the survey is registered at the county? If you know where the pins are located, why spend the large dollars to survey a known property? I would get a survey based on some deeds I had read but for a property that is clearly marked, described and registered why pay for the survey?

I spent close to a $1000 having two lines cleared on a property line. The lines where about 1600 feet long combined. One line they had to really work and to get to the corners had to survey close to 1600 feet to get the 800 feet correct. Surveys are expensive.

Later,
Dan

EddieWalker · Feb 20, 2006

( So the wife feels NO hunters on any land we could get, well that is a NO NO in my book when you 1st move to a new place with lots of land. To me that is looking for problems from people that could of hunted that land for MANY years. So she did agree with me “to a point” to SLOWLY stop hunting over a few seasons, I think that would be best to stop one of the many problems that we could be looking at. )

I think this is a big mistake.

When you buy the land, stop all hunting on it right away. You need to establish that it is your land and what ever the previous owner allowed has nothing to do with you.

There are several reasons for this.

If you let strangers to continue to hunt the land, than they will expect it to continue. You don't know these people and what they are like. The previous owner may have allowed them to do things that you don't aprove of. On my land, the previous owner let hunters shoot does, hunt out of season and cut roads through the place. Three years later and I still have people comeing here expecting to hunt because the previous owner allowed it. I don't know them and don't want them running around my place.

Liability is a huge issue as well. Your the new guy who just bought the land. They might think your some rich guy moving in and can afford a huge lawsuit if they get hurt. Why not, they don't know you. It's allot easier to sue somebody you don't know, and if he's buying land and spending money, why not share the wealth????

If in time you get to know these people and are comfortable with them hunting your land, it's allot easier to change your mind and let them back on than it is to kick them off after you've been there awhile.

Good luck,
Eddie

SnowRidge · Feb 20, 2006

Does survey in this case mean recent? 

I took her to mean a new survey. Without one, the title insurance won't cover boundary errors.

MotorSeven · Feb 21, 2006

Snowridge,

Let me explain a little. My land had never been surveyed. In remote County's, land is still recorded at the courthouse by land marks, creeks, ridge lines, rocks trees...etcetc. In my area there have been frequent disagreements to what the original land owner understands what his property line is VS the survey that his new neighbor just had done. It takes alot of hours in the courthouse by the surveyor to interpret these boundry descriptions that in some cases are over 200 years old. The margin for error is substantial sometimes thru no ones fault.
In my case, when i looked at my original tract, a perfect building spot(flat, 2ac saddle, on top of ridge) turned out to belong to the farm behind me. The guy i was buying the land from had logged this very spot 3 years earlier. The real owner told me that he found out about the logging after it was too late, so he didn't make an issue because the damage was done. My surveyor was giving this info, and yep, confirmed that the section in dispute would not be part of my farm. Could you imagin what would have happened if i didn't find out until after i built a house there?
If you are getting a large chunk of land, and the neighbor disputes a property line and has a well founded argument backed up by family records, i don't care what a survey says, i would not start a war by trying to grab what may be a very small section of land. I am sure there of those here that would fight tooth and nail for a couple of acres, but if you have a " range War" for the next century, who really won?
I also bought title insurance on both tracts, even though it is not common practice in the area........it just made me feel better and was under $200.

RD

dmccarty · Feb 21, 2006

RD,

In you case getting a survey done makes sense since a survey has not been done or might be confusing. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif Before we bought our land I spent hours in the courthouse researching properties. I read lots of deeds discribing property lines by saying the NE corner was the large Sycomore tree next to the gully that empties into Bear Creek. In those cases I would want a survey done just to know what I was buying. And the assumes there are no pins in the ground to mark the lines.

On the other hand if the property already had a survey registered by the county and if I can find the pins on the ground why pay for a survey to purchase the land? Now if it was at all unclear concerning the line location its a new issue.

I had two lines resurveyed and cleared. One to keep a neighbor from putting a septic field on my land. The second was so I site my house. I knew the locations of the corners but I wanted a pin close to the house site. And the bank required a survey of the foundation which is another story.

Later,
Dan