Part
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Part
01
Greenhouse Sites
After an incredibly exhaustive search, your research team was able to find three properties in total that came close to meeting the research criteria. What we saw was outside of the budget, and the listings we saw that fell under the budget had their disqualifying factors such as there being too many trees, the land being too sloped, the land being too residential, or there being no water or electricity. We still went ahead and included three that could be considered if price and other factors weren't issues. Based on our search, we think it's possible that no properties match the criteria as is. We explain our methodology below and detail some findings.
Methodology
Our first search was to use realty and land leasing sites such as Zillow, Realtor, Land and Farm, and Farm Flip, to do straightforward searches for land that fit all criteria. To help us in our search, we used a map of Georgia's counties to see all the counties that the map that was provided cross through, and they were Fulton, Cobb, Dekalb, Gwinnett, Barrow, Rockdale, Walton, Newton, Oconee, and Clarke. We realized that when our price ceiling was at $25,000, not many results came up. Even though we thought $75,000 was too high, we tripled our ceiling so that we could catch all listings that were a little over $50,000 and less. The search turned out to be somewhat effective, as we were able to find many possible candidates. In the end, we eliminated many that had mainly residential zoning, those that had sloping land and those with too many trees on the land. We ended up with three possible candidates, however, because we needed to find at least six and the prices were very high, we changed strategy.
We then thought that many farmers and other people may want to sell land themselves instead of going through realtors. So we looked at classifieds sites such as Craigslist, and we also looked for mentions of available land on Facebook and eBay. With this search, we set our price ceiling at around $30,000 and got more results that we could sift through. Since Craigslist results didn't have pre-compiled data on all listings like zone meanings, we had to do our own research to see the zoning code each city or county uses. For instance, we saw some posts in Gwinnett County use 'RA200', which we found means that zone is for residential and agricultural purposes. Even though our search brought up numerous results, we realized that a lot of the land was either too far north, or were too residential in nature, as we saw in some Clarke County and Athens listings with codes of 'RS-8'. We didn't find any listing solely for agricultural purposes that were in the area of interest. We raised our ceiling again to $50,000 to see if we could catch any more that we could use, but in the end, this search did not bring up anything, so we changed strategy.
Our next strategy was to go through the zoning of each state and look at which small towns would have enough land for agricultural purposes. We thought in doing this we could find small towns that may not be on the forefront of searches and then dig deep for any available land there. In Gwinnett County, for instance, we saw a lot of agricultural zoning in small towns like Braselton and Dacula, and we used this information to do a deeper search for available land. We then found a tool to do just this called Acrevalue, however, most of the functions were blocked in the free tier, including setting a price ceiling in order to get cheaper. After this, we changed our strategy again.
We thought that there may be a possibility that some realty agencies do not make their offerings on sites like Zillow, so we thought to look through the websites of companies such as North Georgia Mountain Realty, Premier Atlanta Real Estate, and others. With these searches, we made sure to search for discounts, sales, and even auctions. In these sites, discounted pieces of land were filled with trees, and none of them fell into the area of interest. Eventually, we ended up on a site called Lands of America which claimed to be the #1 online rural real estate broker. When we set our ceiling at $35,000, we realized that we weren't getting many results that were unique or different. These attempts to get cheaper results were not successful, so we include them as lots to consider if for some reason the budget was no longer in the way. Also, in our search, we have seen some great properties that fit the price outside of the area of interest, such as in Newton, Cherokee, Habersham, Jackson, and Butts Counties.
We believe that with the current criteria, there currently may not be any properties like that. Take Zillow for instance, when we repeated our search, the map only showed one point in the area of interest. Also, in one of our searches for farms, we realized that many that fit the criteria had already been sold. This is why we think that at this point in time there may not be any more land like this available. However, the tool AcreValue could reveal more than what we could find elsewhere. Also, as mentioned above, nearby counties do have properties that fit the criteria exactly.
Properties To COnsider:
2548 Jones Pine Rd Unit 7
Location: Good Hope, GA 30641 — Walton County
This lot has electric and septic utilities. The topography is level and there are some trees in the area.
0 Autry Rd
Location: Auburn, GA 30011 — Barrow County
There is access to 220 V of electricity, gas, and water. The topography is level and trees only surround the land.
0 Ponder Pine Unit 3
Location: Madison, GA 30540 — Morgan County
There is access to electricity and there is a pond nearby. The land is mostly flat and it has very few trees surrounding it.