You are thinking about investing in land.
The good news is you've got a lot of choices.
And that's also the bad news.
If you have no idea how to find potential properties, you're likely to feel overwhelmed.
You might be tempted to research the universe of data by casting a net that would trap too many fish.
Or structuring a search that could only catch sardines wearing red hats.
Either extreme will give you more frustration than productive results.
The most important part of your search is what you do before you search.
It is defining the type of property you're looking for and formulating the criteria likeliest to lead you to your target properties.
The criteria should be specific enough to eliminate properties, but not so narrow as to make it virtually impossible to find any parcel matching them.
You start by laying the most limiting criterion over your other search parameters so that you will wind up investigating a smaller, not a larger, number of properties.
Remember, the goal is not just finding the property you want, but being able to do it as quickly as possible.
Even a properly designed search will take hours of time and effort and may not produce the results you want.
So how do you select your criteria? Suppose your objective is to find land parcels in a particular county that would be likely to produce 2 to 5 residential building lots after subdivision.
This means you should limit your search to parcels large enough for at least 2 building lots and located in municipalities that have public water and sewer.
Accessibility to existing public water and sewer lines eliminates much of the guess work in estimating the potential yield of the property.
Invest in a good county map that shows the geographical boundaries of each municipality and then select one municipality to begin your search.
The key here is to lay the most limiting criterion over your broader search parameters.
In this example, the limiting criterion is the accessibility to public water and sewer because chances are, there are many more parcels in that municipality that could produce at least 2 building lots than those that could be serviced by public utilities.
You can identify the locations of the utilities by looking at maps of existing and proposed utility lines at the municipal office or area land planning body.
Choose one of the areas served by public utilities.
Then look at the zoning map and applicable zoning ordinance provisions for the residential zoning districts that are located in the utility area you selected.
Next you have to identify parcels in each zoning district that are large enough for your purposes.
Here's a quick way to roughly estimate this: (the number of lots desired x the minimum lot size specified in the zoning) x 1.
5 and divide the result by 43,560 sq.
ft.
So for example, one zoning district requires lots to be at least 40,000 sq.
ft.
and you want 5 lots.
That means you should be looking for parcels of at least 7 acres in size (5 lots x 40,000 sq.
ft is 200,000 sq.
ft.
x 1.
5 is 300,000 sq.
ft.
divided by 43,560 sq.
ft.
is 6.
89 acres).
Once you do your calculations to determine roughly what size the parcels need to be, consult the municipal parcel maps to identify properties of that size that are located in both the specific zoning district and utility area you previously selected.
Driving by the properties on the list you have now created will help you eliminate the undesirable ones before you spend time and effort in contacting property owners.
It helps to highlight the properties you want to drive by on the parcel maps and then take notes as you're looking at them.
Your last step is to assemble owner names and mailing addresses for the parcels on your short list, and you can identify the owners by doing searches in tax assessor databases.
It's a good idea to focus on one utility area at a time and to exhaust all of the utility areas within one municipality before moving on to another municipality.
This will make it easier for you to research, organize and manage the data and to not get overwhelmed by it.