My Husband and I Made This Mistake When Buying Land, and It Cost Us Thousands

Don't make this same error when purchasing a property.

Several years ago, my husband and I decided to build a new house in Florida. We researched our options carefully and looked around for a property that was close to Disney. Ultimately, we found a plot of land that was about a half hour away and that would give us the privacy we were looking for, since it was on several acres. 

We did a lot of due diligence with the property, including making sure we could build the house we wanted on the land and that we could live with the HOA rules. And we made sure it was affordable since we didn't want to take out a mortgage, because we wouldn't actually start building right away and we didn't want to make payments on an empty plot of land. 

But, unfortunately, we made one big mistake -- and it was a costly one. 

This is the big error my husband and I made

When my husband and I purchased the property that we will ultimately build our home on, the big mistake that we made was that we didn't realize our driveway would need to cross over a very small area of wetlands.

See, we purchased a property that was 16 acres and that had an old haul route on it and we thought that we would be able to put our driveway where the existing haul route was so we didn't disturb any of the wetlands at the front of the property. For a variety of technical reasons, however, this did not end up being the case and we discovered after we began looking into building that we would be disturbing a tiny fraction of the protected wetlands because part of our driveway had to cross it in a small area.

This meant we were subject to a huge host of costly requirements, including getting environmental experts to survey the area and determine the impact, and hiring an engineer to create a drainage plan with a culvert so water could flow under the driveway undisturbed.

Ultimately, this took a year to resolve in order to get a permit for the driveway and it cost us over $5,000 to get the requisite professionals involved in the process. Mitigating the wetland impact will also cost several thousand dollars more on top of the fees we've already incurred. And during the time that this took, the housing market went wild so we ended up not being able to find a builder and putting the whole project temporarily on hold and moving into a pre-built house instead.

While we plan to build one day, the wetlands error has undoubtedly cost us an untold sum and has set us back years on the project.

How to make sure you don't make the same kind of mistake

In order to avoid our error, it's important to have a survey done on any property you are thinking about buying, and make sure you understand the impact of the survey. If you have wetlands, conservation areas, or any protected land anywhere on your property, you should talk to the agency that manages it to find out the rules and what this means for your future use. 

By doing careful research, hopefully you can find out the limitations and costs upfront and can make an informed choice about whether to move forward with the property purchase.