Curtis Seltzer  
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RADIO SCRIPT

Listen to the interview:

Radio Interview Script for Curtis Seltzer, author of How To Be A DIRT-SMART Buyer of Country Property.

Interviewer:  I have as my guest today, Curtis Seltzer, author of How To Be A Dirt-Smart Buyer of Country Property.  What’s your book about?

Seltzer:  Thanks for having me on your show.

This book shows buyers how to find, research and buy country property at a reasonable price and without getting clobbered by a hidden surprise. 

Interviewer:  What do you mean by a “surprise”?

Seltzer:  A surprise is something that’s wrong with the property, which you didn’t know about before you bought it.

Real-estate defects—in the title, in the property itself—are often concealed.  Things like—the seller’s acreage turns out to be less than the buyer thought; or the farm’s water supply is polluted; or a neighbor claims the right to cross your new property to get to his.

If you don’t research your target property before submitting an offer, you’re buying a Jack in the Box. Surprises can be both expensive and discouraging.  They make you feel less good about the place you just bought.

Interviewer:  What’s a dirt-smart buyer?

Seltzer:  Someone who knows how to become knowledgeable about country property.

Interviewer:  What exactly do you mean by property in the country?

Seltzer:   Farms. Second homes.  Land with timber that may or may not have commercial value. Undeveloped land—with no buildings.  Land that hunters want for game and wildlife—everything from swamps to forests.  Minerals.

In a rough sense, I’m talking about real estate that’s outside of towns and metropolitan areas.

Interviewer: What’s the single biggest mistake buyers make?

Seltzer:  They buy on impulse.  Snap decisions—based on emotional reaction. Most buyers make a yes/no purchase decision on their first visit, within their first 30 minutes.

Think of all the things wrong with the house you live in, things that a casual visitor can’t see or understand.  Most of us spend more effort researching our next computer or vacuum cleaner than we spend on a $300,000 second home.

Interviewer: Why do buyers make land decisions this way?

Seltzer:  Well, for one thing, impulse is the easiest way to decide.  It takes very little effort.  If it turns out badly, you can blame the seller for being a crook.  And it avoids the conflict of your brain telling you to walk away from a property that you like while your heart is writing a check. 

I think the other reason is that a lot of people don’t know how to research property.  They’re not sure of the questions and not sure where to find answers.  Property research can involve a very broad set of questions, including survey problems, legal questions, evaluations of buildings, timber and minerals, tax considerations.  Nobody teaches this stuff; it can be intimidating.

So the easiest thing to do is to forget about both asking and answering, and just go with your gut.

Smart people do this all the time.

I start my book by recounting the stories of three prominent writers who bought country places without doing any research at all.  Each one then spent thousands and thousands of dollars correcting, fixing and adapting them to what they wanted. The best that can be said of these authors is that each one got a book out of the experience. 

There’s no rule that city buyers have to be country fools.

Interviewer:  So you propose to buy country property using some economist’s cost-benefit analysis?

Seltzer:  No.  I think the way to do it is to find a property that meets most of your needs and a lot of your wants, a property that you like. Then, before you make an offer, do your research.  If that property doesn’t check out, move to the next one that meets most of your needs and a lot of your wants. 

My book shows a buyer how to ask property questions and how to get answers, how to understand the legal issues and get financing, how to negotiate and buy at the right money.

Interviewer:  Why did you write a book for buyers?

Seltzer:  There was no how-to book around to help inexperienced property buyers.  If there were a Consumer Reports for real estate, I wouldn’t have written this book.

It’s unfortunate that with country property, every buyer needs to do his own product research because no two parcels are the same.  One 200-acre patch of woods can be significantly different from another 200-acre patch if the first has been timbered within the last ten years and the second has an access problem. 

Appraisals only scratch the surface; appraisers don’t research property.  An appraiser values a property in terms of other recently sold similar properties. An appraisal gives you an estimate of a property’s current fair market value, but not whether the property is clean, that is,  free of defects and surprises.

Interviewer:  Who did you write your book for?

Seltzer:  Middle-income folks, looking for a second home or some land for $50,000 to $500,000.  A first-time buyer, as well as the individual who’s done it a couple of times.  At 750 pages, there’s something for everyone.

At least four million pieces of country property are bought and sold each year.  And no one needs a rip-off story for their next cocktail party.

Interviewer:  What’s your worst rip-off story?

Seltzer:  It’s one I avoided.  A fellow was selling 3,000 acres of very valuable timber.  The asking price was something over $100 million.  The timber was valued at considerably more than the asking price.  I had an able and willing buyer, but something didn’t smell quite right.  Before we put an offer on it, I called the state’s forester and asked whether the client could get a timbering permit.  The long answer was “theoretically,” the short answer was, “No.”  The land couldn’t be timbered because the state wanted to preserve it for conservation reasons.  The seller knew this, but never disclosed it.  Had I not done the research, my client would have wound up with $200 million dollars of timber that he couldn’t get a nickel out of.  The seller never told me a lie about the timber, he just never told me the truth.

Interviewer:  Why did you write this book? 

Seltzer:  Like every other buyer, I’ve made mistakes during the last 35 years.  I’ve now bought and sold property in about a dozen states and have scoped land in about a dozen others. About 15 years ago, I decided that I could teach myself to be smart about buying country property. Buying right is mainly a matter of research, to know exactly what you’re buying and what it’s worth.  It’s not a matter of being a slick negotiator or tricky, or even rich. I’m good at asking questions and solving problems--and I’m a writer. So I wrote a book. 

I started a business about ten years ago where I help individuals, companies and institutions find and buy large tracts of rural land.  The methods and questions I use on behalf of clients who are looking at 100,000 acres are the same as for folks who just want to buy 100.  This book followed from that business.

Interviewer:  A final thought?

Seltzer:  Sure.  Approach buying country property the way you would go about finding a husband or wife. Take your time.  Check things out.  You shouldn’t get married or buy country property in a fever, especially one that makes you swoon and jellies your knees.

Interviewer: Thanks.  Curtis Seltzer, author of How To Be a DIRT-SMART Buyer of Country Property.  Call toll free: 1 877-289-2665 or on the web at www.bbotw.com.

Seltzer: Thank you.  I hope I’ve helped your audience.

------------------------------------------Outtakes------------------------------------------

Interviewer:  What are some of the differences between country land and suburban property that might produce a problem for a buyer?

Seltzer:  Here are a couple of examples.

A buyer wants to make sure that the seller can and will convey the country property in fee, which means with all rights, both surface and subsurface.  If the mineral rights have been severed from the surface rights, the buyer of the surface may have little say over the mineral owner’s plan to open a gravel pit on the back 40 acres.

A common problem in buying country land is finding a place where a conventional septic system can be installed.  The ground has to meet physical standards for a local health official to approve it.  This is often referred to as a percolation test.  A spot that “percs” can be the site for a conventional septic system, at a cost of $3,500 to $5,000.  If a perc site can’t be found, a non-conventional septic system will cost about $20,000 or so.  Perc standards are being raised around the country.  A buyer cannot assume that even a 100-acre property will have a place that meets local perc standards.

I know buyers who assumed they could find a perc site near where they wanted to build and couldn’t.  This meant that the cost of buying land and building on it where they wanted to went up by $15,000 over what they budgeted.

A third example involves short acreage.  A lot of country land is sold without a survey.  Acreage for sale is often established from the county’s tax maps, which are notoriously inaccurate.  I found a property that a seller believed contained 295, even though the tax map showed 266 acres, but which actually conveyed about 385 acres.  Most of the time, however, properties are short advertised acreage, five percent or more is not uncommon.  Acreage found in deeds can also be wrong.  I show readers a couple of relatively inexpensive ways to verify a seller’s acreage without going through the expense of a survey.

A fourth example involves disclosure.  A buyer should always ask a seller in his written contract purchase offer to disclose defects in the property’s boundaries, deedwork and physical characteristics, such as a floodplain.  A buyer should ask the seller to disclose the presence of wetlands or endangered species, because either can limit what the buyer can do with his new property.  A buyer should also ask the seller to disclose any boundary disputes he has with neighbors along with any unrecorded easements that allow others to cross through or use the seller’s land.

Interviewer:  How should a buyer go about figuring a fair price?

Seltzer:  Start with the tax-assessed 100 percent fair market value that the county uses to determine the amount of property tax the owner pays.  This valuation is publicly available in the courthouse records.  The next thing to do is talk to the local tax assessor. If you’re looking at 100 acres of unimproved woods, ask him what he thinks the going price is for 100 acres of unimproved woods in that part of the county.  That gives you two valuations as starting points.  A buyer can then go to the courthouse and find recent selling prices of comparable properties, which is what an appraiser does.  Asking neighbors, real estate agents, local bankers and lawyers also helps. The idea is to bring together a number of informed opinions to get yourself in the right ball park.

Interviewer:  Then what?

Seltzer:  You want to make an offer in writing that works for you and is sufficient to get the seller to start negotiating. Every buyer needs to be willing to walk away from a purchase if he’s going to succeed in negotiating on his own behalf.  If you don’t like negotiating for yourself, ask your local lawyer to do it for you.

Interviewer: Lots of people would like to buy a second home in the country but can’t afford it. Do you have any advice for them?

Seltzer:  Sure.  Buy property with one or more severable assets.  Let’s say you want an old farmhouse with five or ten acres.  Look for a property with a house you like and 100 acres of pasture and woods.  You can cut the mature timber in the woodland and sell the cutover land to hunters. Or you can sell the pasture as a second-home lot.  Price per acre is highest for the smallest acreage; it goes down as the acreage being sold goes up. So if you buy 100 acres for $2,000 an acre, you can generally sell four 25-acre lots for $3,000 an acre, which might end up paying for your farmhouse that you keep.

Interviewer:  What qualifies you to write this book?

Seltzer:  Well, at one time or another, I’ve made many of the mistakes I write about.  For the last ten years, I’ve run a consulting business where I help buyers find and research purchases, tracts of 100 or 200 acres up to a half million.  I’ve bought and sold land for my own account for 35 years.  I’ve written other books and have a Ph.D. from Columbia University in political science, which qualifies me to shovel out our cattle barn.  I’ve lived in the country on farms for most of the last three decades—and do most of the work myself.

Interviewer:  Why is country land a good investment?

Seltzer:  Country land is a bad investment if it’s bought too high or if it contains an unfixable flaw, such as lack of useable legal access.  Country real estate is an investment whose virtues, values, liabilities and risks can be learned.  Stocks, in contrast, at least to me are impenetrable.  If a corporation wants to disguise something negative, it can be buried in the financial reports. With a little effort and expense, a land investor can figure out what he’s buying and whether the deal will be profitable. 

The land market is strong and getting stronger in most places.  Land investors should stay away from overpriced property and overpriced areas.  Property can continue to appreciate in those spots, but the more inflated the price, the closer an investor is to not making money. When you buy at the right price, you don’t have to worry about making a profit down the road.

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