Land Love Minus The Deed

For an alternate opinion on the merits of land ownership, we turn today to Henry David Thoreau. In his retreat at Walden Pond, Thoreau sought to live off the land and there found the kind of intellectual freedom that resulted from NOT owning the land.
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to [...]

Bear Land: The New Gold?

I am no economist. And surely the price of rural land across the U.S. have been on the rise (11 percent a year, according to one gov’t study.) And surely many savvy investors have been jumping on rural tracts and timber company offerings as a hedge against THAT COMMODITY THAT IS NO LONGER MANUFACTURED: Land.

But [...]

The Berkshires Seem Dream-like

James Taylor singing at the Oscars Sunday night made LandCrazed think of Massachusetts, specifically the Berkshires in western Mass. Sweet Baby James makes a blogger want to head for Stockbridge, especially under the snow of winter.
Apparently, the Great Barrington area has retained some of the low-key ambiance we felt 30 years ago when we [...]

Bush Wants to Sell Forest Lands

Penny wise/pound foolish. Or maybe it’s penny foolish/pound foolish.
The Bush Administration gives tax cuts to the rich, and then, in order to pay the bills for rural schools, he puts 300,000 acres of National Forests up for sale, as it was announced (quietly, again, after last year’s scheme) in the 2008 federal budget.
“The National [...]

Another day, another land auction website

Happy Birthday to you/How old are you now?
In the case of AuctionAcres.com, which has a copyright date of 2007 on the bottom of its home page, the age is … newborn!
And so the family of land auction websites increases yet again. As we obsessively assert here at LandCrazed (the blog) — these are hot cyber [...]

Land appreciation @ 25-year high

There’s a reason land sale sites, auction companies and brokers with rich-text websites appear to be boom business.
In 2006, farmland values in the United States rose at their highest year-over-year rate since 1981, according to The U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the highest year-over-year rise (11 percent) in 25 years. Read this report:

USA Today [...]

And the Land Oscar Goes to …

Anytime I drive to Charlottesville, VA. through the Shenandoah Valley, with the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains rising up on the horizon, I have one thought in mind:
Damn that Sissy Spacek! She gets to live here!
Nothing spells the escape from celebrity like rural land. So on a night when Hollywood’s stars walk the red [...]

With a name like Sunnyland …

It is the quest of LandCrazed to occasionally survey the growing number of rural land sale companies across the United States. The marketplace appears to be booming, with more and more web list services and auction companies vying to capitalize and expand this interesting market.
Next up on the auction block: Sunnyland.com.
The Phoenix-based broker/auction company will [...]

Mazama, Winthrop, Twisp

Wow. The New York Times Sunday travel section featured an article on the Methow Valley on the very same day we arrived in this remote part of Washington state for a weekend of cross-country skiing. Just like my friends who retired from their Seattle newspaper jobs and moved to the Methow Valley said … it [...]

Heading East of the Cascades …

Landcrazed (the blogger) will be pulling outta Seattle this morning. We’re heading east over Steven’s Pass, through the Cascades into the beautiful Methow Valley.
Do we bring the checkbook? Because YOU KNOW that land in north central Washington is just, well, sensationally pristine and “affordable.” Further east, in Okanogan county, the idea of 40 acres for [...]