Part 3: A New Construction Pivot
Should you buy a single lot or raw land as your first foray?
Greetings subscribers,
This New Construction Pivot series is going to be about a 6 part series. The more I get into writing this series, the more information I feel I need to share. For those who subscribe, you saw the specific niche in Part One that I will be throwing lots of cash into over the next 2 years. In that first newsletter though, I had lots of comments and private messages asking me to dig into how to find and buy the land, what to look for, how much to spend, etc. There is so much detail in taking on an endeavor like this, I would be remiss not to share every aspect of what it would take for you to do the same.
Over the past 4 years of my building construction, I’ve made lots of mistakes. I’ve spent money on land I shouldn’t have purchased and then hit grand slams on other pieces of land. I’ve discovered that some places are 100X harder to build on than others and also discovered that some counties are 100X harder to build in than others.
Below, I will outline some lots and pieces of land that I wish I had not purchased which presented EXTREME challenges to build on. I’ll also be going over some of the lessons in finding a great piece of land and what that entails. There are things you need to do up front before making a catastrophic mistake and finding yourself with a worthless parcel that you can’t do anything with and can’t sell.
Parts 4, 5 and 6, which will be released weekly moving forward will dive into more numbers, how to find good subcontractors, what you should be paying for certain aspects of your build and how to know if you’re getting price gouged.
As I mentioned in Part 1, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is building your own Short Term Rental in a vacation spot or close proximity to one. This could also translate to building your own Long Term Rental if you choose to go that route. Not hiring an outside builder who will make a significant profit off of building something for you, not buying an existing cabin…but building one for yourself. It’s much easier to do than you’d think. Heck, I had never built anything other than a Lego set 4 years ago. My life was centered around the bug business. But now I just broke ground on number 10 on my own. This will be a $1.5 million dollar luxury cabin and my build cost will be around $750,000 all in (including the land). Building your own will save you nearly 50% of what you’d pay for an existing one. I’ll be breaking down all the costs on spreadsheet, from the lot clearing and footer dig, to the framing, dry in all the way down to the finishing touches. I assure you, if I can do this, so can any of you. So let’s get down to the nitty gritty of finding the land.