Ed Johnson wrote:Hey Micheal. How did you come upon your property? MLS seems very incomplete... I'm in the same area and looking for similar
We had been looking for a property for close to three years. We had put an offer on a property near Omemee but we would not come up far enough. (It sat on the market for 8 months and they ended up selling for our final offer). Our general requirements changed over the years as we refined what we wanted based on what we could afford and what was really usable. Finally settling on 15 acres was, in hindsight, hardly settling. Our original searches were in the 50-70 acre range: a very difficult range to find unless it is a working farm. Keep looking! And if you are going with an agent, let me know and I can suggest a few good rural specialists in that area.
One thing to be aware of: rural mortgage financing. It turns out that conventional mortgages will cover only the house and one or two acres. Everything else, you are on the hook for. We discovered this at the last minute and needed to scramble to come up with an additional $15,000 to cover the difference between the mortgage and the buying price. This is in addition to the $20,000 down payment that we scraped together. It was a real shock and could have been a real kick to the you-know-what.
In the end, it worked out better for us. We borrowed the money from my brother, and not wanting to be in debt to relatives forced us to pay off even earlier than we would have paid off a bank: $15,000 in two years. So now we have $15,000 in equity in addition to the mortgage pay-off equity.
