looking for creative ideas for vacant land

[Ben Morrow]

Hi Everyone, I am a newbie just looking for some advice or help. I inherited some land a couple of years ago and I am attempting to use it in one way or another to start investing in real estate. It has been on the market for over a year and I haven't had much interest. The township won't allow me to rezone it from an R2 some my options are limited. Anyone got any ideas for me? I have inquired about getting an equity line of credit but could not find any banks that would do it. I am sure there are plenty of creative ways of using the land or developing it that I am just not aware of and that's why I came here looking for help. Thanks in advance.

[Brianne H.]

@Ben Morrow is this vacant land in the city or rural? I'm envisioning rural, so this may or may not work for you. My dream has always been to have my own little acreage and have my horses in the backyard, but still be close enough to the city to commute to my job there. In my area, to get an acreage with a decent enough house for a small family, and at least 4+ acres for animal zoning and pasture, with halfway decent fencing and animal shelter, within 30 mins of the city limits, you're looking at about $550,000+. You're lucking out if you find something that meets the criteria for $500,000. 

This summer we bought 7 acres of raw land with lake view, cut right out of the Alberta prairie and right on the edge of that "reasonable commute" radius. We paid $150,000, which I think was a pretty good price since 3 acres down the road a ways sold for $170,000. We were able to get a loan through a provincial credit union for 50% LTV. As soon as we put a well on it (and we lucked out with the well, 12 GPM at 65' deep of clear clean water) it turned into serviced land, which we then refinanced with the same credit union for 75% LTV. We then used that 25% that came back to us, plus virtually all of our unsecured lines of credit to dig and pour a foundation, bring in utilities, build a horse shelter and fencing, and we moved a house onto it. The house is a 1961 3/1.5, 1236 ft2 that was going to be bulldozed as the previous owner wanted to build a 2 story. Perfectly good house, well taken care of through the years, just cosmetically still living in the 60's for the most part. 100% liveable as-is. For the house, the move, and the deck that came with it, it was only $56,700 all in. In this area, it was much cheaper than building, and when it's done it'll be just as easy to finance as any other house. If we were to put a new mobile/modular on it, we'd be looking at about $150,000 new, and then you'd have a whole lot of depreciation, stigma, and more difficulty in financing.

In our case, this is going to be our primary for at least the next 10+ years. We'll gut all the cosmetic stuff, and I anticipate spending about 30k for renos. With some landscaping and a detached garage, I'd say we're all in for about $370k, and we're looking at it being worth conservatively $550k when it's completely done. We put in $80k of our own money, and are looking at an equity gain of about $100k. In the future, if I found a nice parcel of vacant land, I would probably do the same thing again, except this time I would look at trying to get my hands on at least 10+ acres with the ability to subdivide and do it twice. 

Lowering it onto the foundation. (It's also looking pretty terrible along the front as they had to remove the brickwork as it wasn't safe for travel, but we'll put new stone on.)