That's less than a quarter acre.

hey, beggers cant be choosers, and coming from my 2500 square feet lot, 10000 square feet is decent

thats one co- visionary in. looking for two more dreamers.

If you pull the house out, that is more room for trees.

-Ethan

Think seasonal rentals
I have a friend who rents out a house during the prime colder months in Ft Lauderdale. French-Canadians love it here, they love the winter beach and sun and they are always renting his place those prime 5-6 months

LycheeLuva...... This could work for you because the lychee and mango season here is the warm and hot months. Some avocados come in the summer and September. Just saying but renting it out each winter or every second winter could help the cash flow

We had a rental once...granted, it was Keystone, not FL, but it was a PITA. You can use a management company to take care of the administrative hassles, but they will hose you to the tune of 50%. There is always something breaking that needs to be fixed replaced and you have to go on faith that the $ to make the repairs is well-spent.

The other thing with rentals is that the time you want to use the property is generally the same time as the renters want to rent it.

I like Ethan's idea. ;-)

Robert

robert- i think we have someone who lives on the block of the property who will act as property manager and gardener in exchange for a share of the property (though i havent confirmed this yet(.
we would not be looking to use this as our vacation home- the idea is to get a small piece of what seems like an amazing investment and try and have it rented out to long term year round renters- while also having a place to plant all those trees we always fantasized about planting.
i think there should be ample space for at least 100 trees.

For fruit lovers, it would be better purchasing a 1-5 acres of land below 100k. Then setting up a holding company and turning the land into a lychee/mango orchard.

I would buy bare land. Rentals are a pain in the butt if you don't live near by and have a lot of skills to fix things (and the tools). My brother has owned a rental for 5 years now and is constantly replacing/fixing things. Just the other day he had to rip out the plumbing and in the process opened up a whole can of worms (more leaks, melted wires, etc). Not saying rentals are a bad idea, lot of money if you know what you are doing. I'd rather have an owner occupied type set up (duplex/condo), where you live on site to watch things.

Buying a 1+ acre lot with no house or anything on it sounds like the best idea to me. Inexpensive homes in South Florida are generally pretty dilapidated.

I agree with the bare land idea. Land in fl is ridiculously cheap right now. I would bet you could find a decent sized piece of land for under 10k and not have to deal with the all of the crap that comes with owning a house.

how much would $50 get me?

The property behind mine has gone into foreclosure and is now up for sale by the bank that took the loan through the FDIC after the previous bank (holder of the loan) went bust. To give you an idea of relative property values here since the crash, this 10 acre tract sold for $3.3 million about 4 years ago. That's $330,000 per acre. It had been a private residence and then a paso fino horse breeding farm for the years prior to its purchase by a developer who wanted to put a bunch of high price homes on it. The developer spent much money and effort trying to get the property re-zoned from Agricultural to Residential. After a two year fight, they succeeded in getting approval to put 28 houses on this property and its adjacent 5 acre tract on the corner of my street. .....only to be met with a market crash just prior to ground breaking. Now the property is listed for sale at $1.1 million or $110,000 an acre. I'm hoping the property doesn't sell as a 10 acre unit and the bank wants to carve it up and get it off their books, cheap. The back 2.5 or so acres is directly behind my property and would hopefully cost significantly less per acre than the going current rate since it would have no access to the roads. So, I am saving my pennies...

Harry

So it looks like $100,000 an acre is possible in South Florida right now, and that's suburban land.

You can get land for WAY cheaper than 100k an acre right now. You could probably find 1 acre lots with a decent house for under 100k. To give you an idea, the 1/4 acre lot on one side of my house sold for almost 50k during the peak. The lot on the other side of my house just recently sold for 4k. My house was worth $170k during the peak. Now, I'd be lucky to get 70k for it.

I would suspect that land would be extremely affordable outside the urban/suburban areas.

On my last trip back from FLL to Tampa, we (for some reason) followed our GPS, which was attempting to cut off the big corner between alligator alley and 75 northbound. This amounted to the middle of nowhere, although there were occasional homes. I wonder about the feasibility of buying a few acres in an area like this for small-scale commercial growing. Much of this area felt agricultural labor-ish anyway.

From what I understand you can pretty easily find cheap 5 acre lots, but those areas are not prime for subtropical fruit tree cultivation. You'd be having to fight every year to keep things from getting damaged from cold snaps. The only areas that tend to stay above 30F consistently would be closer to coast (say within 10 miles of the coast) and from palm beach county to dade county, where property values would be in the 100k/acre range or higher depending on the location. Otherwise, you'd be limited to hardier subtropicals (eg, citrus, jaboticaba, etc) or would have to take emergency travels every year and figure out how to cover everything up :-).

Even Homestead in Southern Dade county tends to be 3 to 4 degrees cooler than where I'm at in Broward.

Jeff

Jeff, excellent point. I forget how much difference the inner areas of our state are, and that even 10 miles from the coast is pushing it.

I live in St. Pete near the bay and are up to 10 degrees warmer on cold mornings than south Tampa near the bay. Further inland and you're talking about a 15+ degree difference at times.

The local trees tend to paint a very representative image of historical lows. Around here I look for mangos, jackaranda, royal poinciana, plumeria, etc. and also assess their sizes.

Jeff-

I think we are actually in a warmer temp zone than south dade.

http://floridagardener.com/misc/floridazones.jpg

http://www.florida-palm-trees.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/florida_zones1.jpg

tropical those maps you link to are based on a 1990 usda map.
the national arbor organization updated the 1990 usda map in 2006 and it now has all of south florida in zone 10

Here is a link that might be useful: hardiness map

Alexi is right. There is a definite temperature differential in those areas. That's why Homestead always gets much more devastation than us here in Broward during cold events.

I'm right on the border of the 10b zone myself. Eric B who lives about 4 miles north west of me (and appears to be in the 10a zone) had way more damage than me the winter before last. He had a mature guanabana that either died or came really close to dying. Also, a guy in Parkland maybe 10 miles north west of me (zone 10a) actually lost a few mango trees to the winter of 2009.

Firmly within the 10b zone I've seen folks with mature cashew trees that suffered no damage. I had severe damage to mine.

Zone 10b is where you ideally want to be to avoid having damage to the more sensitive crops. Fairchild Farm (zone 10a) used to have a cold blog where Dr Campbell would write about his all-night adventures protecting the trees.

Jeff

My guanabana actually dropped a few leaves a couple of nights ago when the forecasted low was 36 degress. Most or all leaves look burnt. Some more than others, but they are fully attached to the branches. Maybe the badly damaged ones will fall off in the future. This weekend, I would like to make shelters for my mamey's and guanabana to prepare for future temp drops. Strangely, the older pace mamey sapote got a few surface pit-like marks (frost), while the younger one looks perfect, which is the one that's closer to the shed. The shed attracts heat when the sun is out, so maybe that's what reduced the damage on that mamey. The new growth on my nam doc mai, kent, and lemon zest (semi-hardened) pulled through it without any problems. I actually had the sprinklers on for 45 minutes during sunset to wet the soil and the trees that day before the temp-drop.