Not sure if its a good deal. Large lot and not too many comps around.

Right. We didn't have many either. Our experience has been thst the existence of the infrastructure didn't help us *that* much. Fwiw. The other persons plan just basically told us that we could build a home of a certain size. Though his was way too expensive for us to build

Good luck!

Thanks jn. Did you pick a house plan or work with an architect before you decided on buying the land? We have a pretty good idea of what we want to build and hope we are both allowed and can afford it.

it seems like building (at least around here) is costlier than buying existing/fixing as we have become accustom to doing. The thing is we haven't found anything we are inspired to fix so building has the appeal of getting exactly what we want-- at least that's the hope.

That's the hope!!! Yes indeed. We were looking for an existing home we could fix up. My spouse wanted to be on the water. That was final. We did see a couple homes that would have worked. One we thought was too expensive but was on beautiful land.

Had we bought that we could have done a lot with it, had a good property, and saved 20% even with new kitchen and bathrooms, floors, etc.

But we saw this waterfront property and decided to build.

A couple years later we went thru a process to hire an architect.

Not the least expensive route. Building like this has a lot of costs you don't think about. Engineering. Bald eagle management plan. Shoreline exemptions. we like our home. And we are lucky we always budget properly. You need money in reserve.

We were talkingabout the architect tonight. He did a good job. But he was an odd duck. Not a very nice person as it turns out. But competent, and I guess that's what counts.

Building is more expensive than buying just about anywhere. That being said, finding what you want, on the right piece of land can be darn near impossible. Where we are in SC, the only existing homes on acreage would either be a very run-down farm house, or brand new house way out of our budget and desired size. We wanted a small, very efficient house on some acreage. To us, the property was the most important factor, so we stretched our budget to get what we wanted. We are building a rather small (1400 square feet) and plain house, but it is very well built, and will be very cheap to 'feed' as we enter retirement. We don't plan on going anywhere, and if we had had the house built to our specs by a contractor, we would never be able to recoup our expenses. Even building it ourselves, we'd be hard pressed to break even.

Everyone's situation is different. For a young, mobile family, you have to watch what you spend, or you lose the ability to move with life's changes. For older couples like us, we built out-of-pocket, and could simply walk away if we so desired. I plan to stay right here until they carry me out toes first, so I don't care (within reason) what we have invested. My personal feeling is that you can build a nice house anywhere, but a special piece of property can be hard to find.