Introducing Rural Land List
Five years ago, my partner and I started dating in Tucson, AZ, where we both grew up. We had both spent our formative years as suburban / city kids, but quickly realized we shared a common dream: to own rural land and build our own home on it.
It seemed daunting. What type of land? Where? How would we afford it? We started looking at land online and even made a trip to Oregon to look at a few properties in person, and we quickly began to realize how much we didn’t know. We clearly were not ready to buy - either financially or in terms of our knowledge.
During the pandemic, we moved to Salt Lake City and bought a house, with the idea of moving deeper into the Mountain West area we both loved. We started exploring Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Southern Utah and thinking about what buying land would be like in those places. We would spend hours on Landwatch and Zillow together, scouting out properties and imagining a future in different parts of the country.
A few things we noticed when searching for land:
There is a lot of amazing land out there at a reasonable price.
Quality rural land is hard to find - it’s scattered across multiple websites, many of which are difficult to search.
There isn’t a great resource for understanding what makes rural land high quality, how to choose an area, or what the purchasing process even looks like.
At the same time, we also noticed that we were not alone. More and more millennials seemed interested in buying land or homes in rural areas. There was a strange confluence of things happening: COVID lockdowns, social dysfunction in cities, the rise of remote work, and a desire to hedge against climate change. All of these things combined seemed to be drawing people from urban areas out into rural areas, and from states like California out into states like Utah, Montana, and Texas.
All of a sudden, buying rural land did not seem like a pipe dream but more like a movement, an ideology, a “doomer optimism” that many people were converging on simultaneously.
In the future, this publication will be focused on finding the best rural land currently on the market and providing access to it in easy weekly format. Along the way, we’ll also be thinking and writing about this new modern “back to the land” movement. Who is involved and why? How is taking shape? What can we learn from it?
More to come at a later date!