Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Life. This episode is all about the things that can go wrong when you're buying some hunting ground. Now, last week I talked about buying hunting land well, which is you know,
honestly a dream for most of us. For some it will remain just that a dream, but for others it will become a reality. That's a huge life wind if you can pull it off. But it's also a big scary investment where a lot of things can go wrong. And to top it up some of the lofty expectations we have a I don't food plots, hitlist box and you know, finally not having to deal with other hunters. I can also go wrong in a lot of ways, ways which you should be aware of before you buy.
And that's what I'm going to talk about right now. I've got two land buying stories to tell you about that are both cautionary tales. The first one involves yours truly and a small twenty nine acre mix a high and low ground located just a bit north of the Twin Cities. Now, Buddy and I bought that land after
I saw homemade for sales sign in the ditch. The price was way too cheap, which should have been a red flag for us, so we did the responsible thing and hired a real estate lawyer to make sure we weren't making a huge mistake. The lawyer found out that the seller hadn't paid its property taxes in years, so the tax bill on the place was six teen grand. Had we just written the guy a check like he asked us to do and not gone through that process, I think we would have been on the hook for
that money. But we were smart about it, mostly because my buddy had been burned before and that felt like we had dodged a big problem there, just because of his advice to hire that lawyer. So fast forward two years and we decided we wanted to put in a driveway so we would have a nice spot to park
when we hunted out there. When I finally tracked down the right person at the Department of Transportation here in Minnesota, he informed me that the state had bought all roadside Eastman's on that highway in two thousand and three, way before we bought it, and for miles along that stretch of highway. In other words, we could park in the ditch, but we couldn't build even an earth and drive off of the highway. Our lawyer had missed that and had actually put it in writing that we had the ability
to build in the land, including a driveway. The seller said as much too, but he never said anything about how he got paid off for that Eastman, and he was obviously full of shipped to begin with, because he lied to us about the taxes too. Anyway, when I called up the lawyer to see what our options were, I found out that he had had a major chess grabb or a few months earlier. He was no longer with us. We were, to put it bluntly, I guess ship out of luck. We still had legal access, although
it wasn't ideal, and we could still hunt it. So my buddy and I sat on it for a few years until someone bought the land behind us. This fellow, after building a permanent stand on our land without permission, then casually mentioned when we confronted him about it, that he wanted to buy our property too. It actually worked out much better than we hoped, and we got out of it. Not only did we make some money, but we also no longer owned right next to the kind
of guy who didn't really much respect property rights. That was a close one with a lot of stress in the details that I'm just leaving out, and it taught me a lot about covering all of your bases if you decide to buy, and how things can still go wrong. It was also a reminder of something you hear often when the topic of buying hunting land comes up, which is to vet your neighbors as well as you can. In our case, we couldn't vet a guy we didn't
know was going to be our future neighbor. You know, land changes hands, people die, people move, Stuff happens, but at least you should be aware of who your neighbors are at the time you're considering buying land. Try to chat with every neighboring landowner you can, or at least every landowner in the neighborhood. If you have any connections with conservation officers in the area, it's not a bad idea to shoot them an email and ask if they've
got any concern about the folks around there. They probably won't let you in on too many secrets for obvious reasons, but you might pick up a vibe that you're about to buy a deer ground right in the middle of a group of outlaws. Now, if you do this, please be respectful of their time. This is pretty low on their priority list, but most eliots will find the time to help you with this. Now onto my second story.
What happened to a buddy of mine. He bought a house on forty acres about ten years ago with the intention of creating a little deer in Turkey oasis that he and his boys could hunt. It was going pretty well for quite a few years too, with my buddy putting in food plots and planning apple trees and selectively
logging all that good stuff. And even though his areas pretty hunted dense, he managed to keep enough dos around his place to always get a crack at a decent buck either while he was bow hunting while he was gun hunting his plan. In other words, I was going pretty well until his next door neighbors moved out and someone new moved in. The guy who moved into that ten acre parcel is the kind of guy whose identity
is really tied into hunting and fishing. He flies the flag loud and proud, But as my buddy got to know him, he realized this dude was a poaching machine. Dear turkeys, ducks, fish, It didn't matter, and he wasn't shy about it either. And it turns out he had been on the radar of the d n R from
past violations. Well, this dude decided it would be easier to shoot some deer over were illegal bait piles, then it would be to do things by the book, and my buddy agreed to let the authorities access advantage point on his land. In other words, he cooperated with the investigation on the promise of staying anonymous. Well, when that dude eventually got busted hunting over bait and for quite a few other violations, his timing could not have been better.
It was all really getting to roll along, just as COVID shut the courts mostly down and created a big legal backlog. At the same time, someone at the state messed up and left my buddy's name on the documents that went to his neighbor's lawyer. As you can imagine, this didn't do much for their relationship. Fast forward like two years, and that guy got off on every charge except one that wasn't even related to hunting. He's back to his old ways, but also dead set on punishing
my buddy. He built a shooting range right along the fence line, which he uses all season long during the last hour of shooting light to keep the deer from moving to my buddy. This is a nightmare. He worked hard, he bought the land, he tried to do the right thing, and then one unscrupulous asshole and our ranks changed it all for the worse things happened, my friends. And when it comes to property and big deer, some of those things can be really ugly. There's no guarantees neighbor wise,
because you don't know who could move in. Generally, you can lessen the chances of dealing with these types of issues the fewer neighbors you have. Now, let's say you've got a theoretical on a forty acre chunk that borders a road to the south. I've got a landowner to the east, to the west, and to the north. That's three not so bad. Now take that same forty and put it in a denser population situation, and you might have people who own smaller chunks of land next to you.
Instead of just three neighbors, several have ten to twenty acre parcels, and now you've got a lot more people to contend with. Maybe they are mostly good people who hunt or who don't hunt, but are just fine with it, and you'll be all right. But you know what they say about one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch. And this might sound crazy, but you can find an awful lot of information about people when you go to buy
some land. What I do when I see a listing that is interesting to me is head on over to on X to find out who owns the land I'm interested in. A quick Google search on the name an address can tell you whether this is a property that was recently inherited, whether the landowner is behind on taxes, and a host of other stuff. You can also look up the neighbors to see what is going on there,
at least as far as public records are concerned. This is a great way to get a feel for why the property might be selling and who your new neighbors might be. It's not enough, but it's a good start, and it's also possible just to scroll over on on X the land and all the neighboring landowners to see if maybe some of your neighbors have food plots, maybe
they've got four wheel trails and obvious signs of hunting. Now, while it might seem like a plus to butt up to someone who is actively managing for deer, I'm not totally sold on that. Some of the worst people I've met my hunting life have been hunters who are into trophies more than anything. And now I'm generalizing here, so hold off before you fire off nasty grahams to meet
it or in an effort to cancel me. It's just that some of the worst things that come out of hunting come out of the trophy over everything mentality, and that can lead to bad relationships. If you shoot someone else's up and comer, you'll be on their ship list. If you shoot the booner they've been babysitting for six years, you might make a list that's worse than their ship list,
but I don't know what you'd call it. And of course you might meet someone who loves working the land and hunting the deer and hit it off great, which makes a good case for chatting up the neighbors before you buy. And unless you've got a friend in the FBI who isn't opposed to breaking a bunch of laws to dig into I don't know random strangers info. Side note, please don't attempt that you really have to do just
all you can. If you do pull a trigger on the land and you haven't met the neighbors, you probably soon will. There are different ways to handle this stuff, but here's what I do. Whenever I meet them. I try to be very kind, but I clearly lay out my rules. I always explained that the land is for my family and mostly my daughters, and that I don't tolerate trespassing. I also casually throw in the fact that I run a lot of cell cameras, even if on
that property I actually won't or don't. Then I trade numbers and I tell the neighbors if they hit a deer and they need to go on to mine to retrieve it, it's all good as long as they let me know first, and I assure them I'll do the same. If there is some request, like one of my neighbors who loves to snowshoe with his wife in the winter, I tell them to go nuts for doughnuts once the
season is over. I also, on one of my properties, allowed the snowmobile trail to stay in place since it only crossed a small portion of my land and it was used during the off season. Now maybe it's b s, but a little good will seems to go a long way in neighbor relationships. Now, dealing with neighbors can be terrible, or it can be a non issue for twenty years. You definitely want the ladder, and one way to get closer to that is to understand the property boundaries. And
I mean really understand them. This is an important one and it requires a recent survey. Many of the hunting land listings are offered up before the tract has actually been parceled out of a larger chunk, so the boundaries and the listing aren't exact. This is good to know, folks. Oftentimes land listings will show superimposed boundaries that might be spot on or not really that close. Figure that out
before you go to the bank. It's also worth noting that a lot of times landowners sort of settled for agreed upon boundaries that may or not be legally correct. The old fence line through the woods might be good enough for forty years between two landowners, but if it's not actually the line, a new person in the mix might be interested in establishing the real boundaries. This type of thing happens all the time. It's bad enough with a shared line, but a whole different thing when it
comes to access. If you don't clearly understand your legal access, don't sign anything. Trust me, some listings have proposed easements or potential access that doesn't mean much yet. Don't buy anything that you don't have a clear cut legal way to access. And for any of those iffy access is if you live in a place with real winter, like I do, pay attention to whether you could get in
there in the winter. If it's a little two track across the seller's land to get back to the landing they're selling you, you might not be able to access that land for I don't know, five months a year, or if you live down south it might flood in the spring. Pay attention to that stuff, think about it. It's also wise to understand if you'll be dealing with any building restrictions, wet land restrictions, in anything, anything that could keep you from utilizing the land the way you
want to utilize it. The more information you have, the better. This goes for making an offer to and understanding what the land is worth at the time. Just as an example, the last property I bought in Wisconsin consists of about ten acres of really nice high woods and about twenty acres of mixed low ground. I made my offer based on that breakdown because the high woods at that time was worth about twice what the low ground was worth.
Going into it with a reasonable offer that shows you understand land values seems to get the deal done in my experience. Now here's where I'm going to cover my ass because I'm not a real estate lawyer. I'm not a realtor either. I'm not really a professional anything, especially when it comes to land buying. So don't be shy about enlisting professional help. In fact, I encourage that just about with any big adult endeavor, a good professional will cost you up front, but it's very very likely to
save you on the back end. Plus you'll have a less stressful experience throughout the entire process because you have someone who knows this stuff inside and out and is advocating for you. That's worth a lot. Now, there are probably thousands of important details I'm missing with this podcast, but I want to end it on a note about setting land goals. As I laid out in the last episode, you can find small, affordable chunks of land in a
lot of places throughout the country. They may not be ideal for growing huge bucks and having a long list of names on your hit list each season, that's okay. Understanding where you're at in life and what you can afford that's important. I look at land buying like this, and although I realized this might be a weird comparison, but hear me out. When I was a freshman in college, I hung out with quite a few of the dudes
on my floor or the dorm. One of them was nicknamed fried Rice because he was a huge fan of getting stoned. He was also really weird about women and that he was so picky he never even really tried. He'd often talk about his dream girl, but that dream girl was so far out of his league it wasn't even funny. I mean, it would be like a first year bow hunter saying that he's only hunting public land in Alabama and only picking his bow up if the buck is at least a typical anyway, fried Rice was
an act like that, Picky, I don't think. I think he was just terrified a rejection, so he safeguarded himself against it by holding himself to him possibly high standards. I've seen quite a few of my hunting buddies do this with land. They'll say they are waiting for the price to be reasonable so they can hit some arbitrary number of acres, but land doesn't usually get much cheaper.
That's the beauty of it as an investment, and although it's tied to a host of regional factors, something like I don't know, eighty acres in a lot of places might be way out of the reach of almost everyone who would listen to this podcast. That could mean several hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a lot of cash eat for the average deer hunter. It's also a way to keep yourself from ever taking the plunge. Instead, like I said in the last episode, if you're interested
at all, start looking. You might not be able to buy a half a section of sweet deer and turkey ground that will provide tons of income and crop rental and keep you in fresh tax at or may for your walls every season, but you can also do a lot with twenty or thirty acres. I'm continually amazed at the variety of work that I can do on my small properties. Just maintaining a little kill plot is both fun and a lot more work than I expected it
to be. You could spend days upon days creating trails or cutting brusher trees and still have years worth of work to do. When I bought my first acre parcel a decade ago, I foolishly thought I'd run out of things to do within a year or two, and I
was so freaking wrong. Every year I find more things to mess with it, more reasons to go spend time with my dogs and my daughters, more reasons to poke around in the winter, more time to daydream about putting in another kill plot, or making a few brush piles for the rabbits, or maybe opening up a few of the random apple trees in there to more sunlight so they grow more. On that small parcel alone, we hunt deer and turkeys and grouse occasionally bears and rabbits and squirrels.
Do I wish I had a I don't know, a couple hundred more acres to work with. You bet your ass I do. But the only way an outdoor writer is going to get that type of land is if he goes back in time and buys Apple stock in Since I can't do that, the next best thing is a shop for good land deals that are more in my financial wheelhouse. I strongly urge anyone who is interested
to do the same. Do this. If you're in your prime earning years and maybe getting a little gray in your beard, or if you're a young go getter wondering if you're ever feel financially secure and if you'll ever get out from under a mountain of student loan debt. The timeline may be vastly different for each of us, but the goal is the same, to own a little piece of deer grown. While you're thinking about that, think about this. Next week, I'm going to start talking a
little more in depth about archery tackle. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I did an episode on whether anyone really needs a new bow? Well, now I'm going to devote some time to bow accessories and then maybe the arrows and broadheads. Hell, I might even talk about deer gun and some bullet choice and a few of the offseason things we should all be thinking about gear wise. That's it for this week. Thanks so much
for listening to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson and this episode was brought to you by First Light. If you want more white tailed info, head on over to our YouTube channel or visit the mediator dot com slash Wired actually do both.