Don’t Ever Buy Land That Won’t Perc

Since we started our journey of purchasing a home again, we flipped back and forth on many things. At first, we were looking for a home with more than 5 acres and under $300K. Uhm, yeah…good luck with that in our area of North Carolina. That may have been the case about 8-10 ten years ago, but you would be hard pressed to find any homes with sizable land for cheap. With the influx of so many people to the area, it has become a seller’s market. People will pretty much buy homes sight-unseen by the time you realize a new home is on the market! Yep, a crazy crazy market it is around here.

I work in a major city here and our kids have sports here too, so we began to look for homes in the surrounding counties that can be considered more rural. Literally, we have looked in all of them, but the problem is the distance to where we needed to be daily. You can get more land further out, but you have to drive 50+ minutes (or 50+ miles) one way. Man, that completely sucks and hence our dilemma. In order to have space for our future goats, chickens, sheep, etc. we knew we had to be out further. (*sidebar* Deidra has been toying with idea of alpacas too, but keeps going back and forth. Besides, I am not sure how I feel about animals with hair-dos that get tall enough to stare me in my eyes!) So, we had to find the happy medium of just how far we are willing to drive.

Again, we went back and forth between buying an existing home and building a home. We’ve been through the steps of architectural design for a house only to back out because we were not willing to spend outside of our budget. Even though we are blessed to be able to afford it, we did not want to be saddled with an astronomical mortgage. It makes no sense to us and even the bank looks at us like we are crazy for wanting less. At any rate, we decided to go the route of buying land first and building later. Once, we had a realtor to tell us, if you find land that you like, just go ahead and buy it because it is being snatched up fast in the area! And they were right too, but you just do not go buy land like you shopping for groceries.

Buying raw land can be a tricky and tedious if you have never done it before. For example, “raw land” is actually a thing. Well not raw as in it hasn’t been cooked, but raw as in it is undeveloped and has not been improved (such as having an easement and/or drive-way for access). One of the tricky parts about looking into rural land is that it typically does not have access to city or county plumbing. This means you need to know whether or not the land will perc. Well, what does that mean? For land to “perc” (percolate) means that it is capable of absorbing water at the proper rate to hold a septic tank. If the land does not absorb the water properly then the county health department may deem the land as not buildable. That would suck because you need a septic tank to handle all of your home’s sewage, but it wouldn’t mean all hope would be lost.

Today, there are ways around land that does not naturally perc. Technology has improved in such a way that the land can be engineered to perc through trenching or by bringing in soil to fill the land to create an area that will hold a septic tank. Of course, this will mean more money to the bottom line especially if you are trying to keep costs low!

For me, this brings me back to a time when as a young teenager, I was with my Daddy. I do not remember what we were doing or talking about at the time, but it went something like this: “wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk wonk……Don’t Ever Buy Land That Won’t Perc……wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk wonk”. That’s the only part that I remember. I have no idea why I even remembered it because I haven’t been a teenager in 20+ years! However, I have to say that I am thankful that Daddy found a good reason to talk to me about it. Unfortunately, we lost him in 2015, but the little nuggets of knowledge that he has left us will live on forever because I will pass them down to our children. So, If you plan on building a home on raw land, I say unless you know somebody that knows somebody or you’re handy yourself, then don’t buy land that will not naturally perc.

Note: I encourage you to do some research yourself on Perc (or Perk) testing. There is a lot of information out there as I have only scratched the surface. I am by no means an expert, but only sharing what we’ve learned over the past year and some change. Also, testing depends on your location.  In some areas, the county health department may be responsible for doing it. In others, it may require an independent soil scientists to accomplish it.  Either way, the final results will most likely end up back at the health department.