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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

They got the property for 3,000 and sold for 115,000 (with cabin)

Where can you buy so low for so much land?

You can easily get cheap empty land in the American West so long as it's farther from the nearest city than your average Javascript crapping baboon is willing to drive with his family in the car for a weekend getaway and the parcel is too small for any commercial use.

The east coast is similar but all the numbers are smaller and the baboons shit under-performing pharmaceuticals and financial products instead of Javascript and SaaS.

Once you make that land livable you will be stampeded by a horde of Californians (assuming west coast) or New Yorkers (assuming east coast) looking to throw their monopoly money at you so that they may acquire your property and exit the rat race.

I'm only slightly exaggerating here.

> your average Javascript crapping baboon

Funny that describes some of my (almost ex) colleagues... :-)

I might be one of your ex colleagues

> Javascript crapping baboon

I'm definitely putting that on my resume.

Yea this story rings true with my data points. I do want a farm and may throw monopoly money at something that is somewhat baselined

$115k isn't really that high, a lot of New Yorkers and Californians would look at such a price with huge suspicion.

this really isnt that far off the mark. lots of Seattle-area folks moving to Leavenworth, and Chelan, driving costs up and grossly overpaying(by locals standards) with cash. Whole new housing developments owned entirely by people from a different county, paying prices way outside what locals can afford.

Its good for me though, my home value has increased significantly with no work from me.

And then they wonder why every local who isn't directly engaged in charging them way to high prices hates them.

Rofl. Yeah it actually makes complete sense.

If you're willing to dig in and make stuff happen, so that your skills/chutzpah combo is like 2-3 standard devs outside the norm... you can get a crazy good deal.

>so that your skills/chutzpah combo is like 2-3 standard devs outside the norm... you can get a crazy good deal.

This is true in so many different applications.

Index WA is meth central and incredibly dark and dank in the winter so that might explain the cost.

Literally every locality I have ever had any interaction with on the West coast falls into one of two categories:

1) Is a major metropolitan area (LA, OC, SF, SV, Seattle, a few others)

2) Self identifies as the meth-capital of <state>|the US| the world

Probably tons of places in the rural West. Note this was only a 1/4 acre and off-grid.

The rural American Midwest can also be quite inexpensive. Of course, you have to put up with harsh winters, hot and humid summers, poor secondary education, living 3 hours away from the nearest natural grocer (though maybe you can raise your own chickens and grow organic food) and conservative politics. I do find the bucolic landscapes and slower pace of life appealing at some level, however.

> and conservative politics

A European here. Does such a thing as a liberal rural state exist in the US? Could Colorado be considered as such?

Edit: I forgot about Vermont, which looks and sounds[1] a lot like Northern Europe to me.

But can rural lifestyle and liberal politics be combined with warmer climate in the US?

Maybe rural California?

Edit 2: After reading all the responses, it seems that I should be looking for liberal rural counties rather than states.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=nKcUOUYzDXA

Rural Colorado (e.g. not Denver/Boulder) is fairly conservative.

Vermont almost certainly comes closest. (Where Bernie Sanders is from.)

Maybe Vermont? Speaking for Colorado since I live here, apart from the urban "Front Range", Colorado is incredibly rural. One county to the west of Boulder (where I live) is Grand county (the size of the American state of Delaware) with a population of 15,000 people. Apart from the ski towns, rural Colorado is definitely on the conservative side of the spectrum, politically.

As another European, I'm not sure this is just an American thing (though it's maybe more pronounced there). Most European countries also have some degree of urban/rural political divide, with rural being farther right.

Even here in Ireland where we don't really do extremes of politics anymore (we don't have a hard/nationalist right in the same way many places do) there was a double digit percentage difference on the abortion and same-sex marriage referendums between rural and urban areas.

Don't know about Colorado but agree about Vermont. Very progressive state. They also have great local food which is rare for remote states.

Rural California is just as conservative as rural anywhere else. Vermont is the only state I can think of, maybe parts of Maine.

There are parts of states that voted for Clinton in 2016 that are pretty rural, but the rural parts (including in California) tend to be more conservative than the main cities, as in the case of Colorado.

I doubt you'll find many rural counties in the US that went strongly for Clinton (as a proxy for liberal). That said, the area around many college towns--quite a few of which are pretty rural by big city standards--are often more liberal than elsewhere.

Best you could hope for would be a small college town in an otherwise rural area (Or Vermont, as you say, though I'm not as familiar with the details of their politics). Even in the most liberal US states, once you leave the urbanized areas conservative views dominate. OTOH, even the most conservative states have liberal cities or at least liberal neighborhoods.

Liberal/Conservative in the US is very much an urban/rural divide at this point.

Even in Vermont, a lot of the rural area is conservative. Consider that ~1/3 of the population lives in the Burlington Metro area, add in a bunch of other small college towns that are more liberal and you can see why Vermont votes more liberal. Indeed the rural parts are probably more liberal than other parts of the country, but you'll still see quite a few trump signs and places the vote strictly Republican/More Conservative. Even our Governor is Republican (although rather left for a republican). Take a look at how towns voted in the last Presidential Election: https://electionarchive.vermont.gov/elections/view/82048/

Although only one county in the state, Essex, went for Trump--which is in the extreme northeast of the state and, unsurprisingly, is the poorest county in the state.

I guess the basic algorithm for finding the most rural progressive places in the US would then require selecting the most rural liberal counties[1] that are also in liberal-led states.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/20...

Take a look at Redfin/Zillow, set it to a $1-$5000 range, and zoom out. You'll find various lots for sale, some less out in the boonies than you might think.

The land is a quarter acre, which isn't that much (that's 1,000 square metres), off-grid, in the middle of nowhere in Washington State.

I've Googled this and here (England, sure completely different country, but also quite crowded) 'poor livestock land' (which I think their land would qualify as) is worth on average £5,000 an acre, which is about $1,625 for a quarter acre. In Scotland it goes down to £2,000 per acre.

I can therefore imagine that $3,000 was not such an impossibly low offer, not least if the seller accepted immediately.

He did at least have access to electricity. No fresh water is a dealbreaker for a lot of people though.

"so much" land is a quarter acre. I don't know about Washington, but in Texas, they would have grossly overpaid - I know relatives who got entire acres for half that.

Depending on the exact location, you can get land for as little as $1000/acre in central Oregon. $12,000/acre isn't impressive at all for off-the-grid non-farmable land.

There's a lot of land this cheap in places where there are no utilities and/or access to the property.

landwatch.com has 5,734 listings for properties in the US priced for less than $3,000 right now.

Yea, I've been looking for off-grid land to build my bug-out cabin for the zombie apocalypse, and there's always a reason for parcels that are really big and cheap. Access: Is it boxed in by other property without a way to actually get to it? Wastewater: No septic? Why? Will the parcel pass a perc test? If there's a system, is it big enough to support the size structure you're planning to build? Water: No well? Why? Probably a reason. How deep is the aquifer? Is it seasonal? Usability: Is the parcel entirely on steep hillside or maybe it's one big marsh? Probably other things I'm not thinking about. Every one of these things is a risk with a price tag.

WA Real Estate agent checking in here - others in this thread are spot on. Generally has to do with size of lot, proximity to civilization, access to power / water, water rights, encumbrances, and actual viability of building. In short - there's a reason it's so cheap.

Somewhere in my post history is an answer to this question: a couple minutes of googling turned up land in West Texas for around $250/acre.

West Virginia has tons of cheap lots, some small ones can be had for less than 10 grand.

Plenty of land for cheap if you don't mind the neighboring houses smelling strongly of cat urine and occasionally getting into gunfights.

Or if you're willing to live somewhere with no access to fresh water, which is what these guys did.

America is so, so big and not so dense. There’s a ton of supply of land.

Here in Louisiana for sure.

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