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Literally around the farm

I’m just commenting because this is an excellent title and you deserve some credit for that. Nicely done! :clap:

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Do you HAVE to sell? If not, then DO NOT DO IT. Retain ownership and rent house and small yard area under conditions to suit yourself to very carefully selected tenants. Do not do lease to anyone beyond standard 1-year period for any reason. That’s the only way to get rid them in an easy, semi-timely manner if they don’t comply with your specific conditions or you can’t live with them for other reasons. I’d recommend doing rental/lease through a property management company versus trying to do it personally as an individual direct to tenant.

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If you are really that worried, then your only logical choices would be to

  1. keep the property & rent it or use it for personal use.
    Or
  2. section off an acre or two with the house & just sell that, keeping the rest of the acreage for yourself.
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What lenapesadie said. You cannot control it once you sell it. [quote=“lenapesadie, post:20, topic:754037, full:true”]
If you are that concerned about who lives there, then you should rent it. It’s like a horse, if you want to control what happens to it in the future, don’t sell.
[/quote]

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Renting isn’t something i’m considering. Very rural here/no management companies. And i have zero wish to be involved with them regularly/personally. Don’t want to worry about the properties’ safety and possible degradation. Don’t want to worry about how to get rid of someone who stops paying rent, etc. Not something i want to have to do.

I wish to sell to some nice people who do not hunt. I want to know how i might accomplish that goal.

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This just might work!! House is close enough to the road, little barn is close enough to the house. I could easily do this! i LIKE this idea. thanks!!!

The down side to sectioning off a small acreage to sell with the house is the same downside you are using for not renting. If you are very rural, to the point of no renters, then most people who want a small lot are not going to be willing to travel way out there for it.

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I don’t know where you live, eightpondfarm, but it’s not here in Massachusetts. Here, if someone meets your price on a house MLS listed, you generally have to sell/ rent to them. Not allowed to be discriminatory, and I get that.

We have 6 rental units in four houses on our farm plus the house we live in. I find that we have the most success when we find tenants by word of mouth, rather than getting an agent involved or advertising. When we have to sell this place, it’ll be an entirely different situation. i admire your thought processes and hope we can implement something similar.

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Reasonably, you can’t. You need to accept that fact.

I’m sorry if that sounds harsh - I actually totally understand (and would feel the same as I also have livestock) wanted to control who is next to me. There’s nothing worse than owning your own little slice of heaven (whatever that looks like for you) and having hell next door.

The only way you can 100% keep control is if you own it. There are a few ways you can do that, all of which have pretty much been outlined here already: rent, subdivide off the acreage and keep that while selling the house and maybe a couple acres with it, or just own it all outright and let it sit unoccupied.

It sounds like the housing market in your area makes that tricky, which is frustrating but doesn’t change your options. It sounds like you’d like to have your cake and eat it, too, which is just not feasible in the scenario you’ve presented.

As someone who is in the market to buy a property with acreage, be aware that it is a huge turnoff for potential buyers to get screened. Even if your intentions are good and reasonable, as someone said earlier in the thread, it makes people start to wonder what kind of neighbor YOU might be (or in our case so far, how ridiculous and stressful dealing with the seller is going to be). Were I in your shoes, I would market the property via word of mouth and to people you know, and network that way. You’re more likely to find someone who shares your values. But again, keep in mind that once it’s sold, it’s sold, and if your dream buyer has something happen that causes THEM to have to sell in the near future, you don’t have a leg to stand on and will have to deal with whomever ends up there.

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You may have some control when you sell it the first time, but once they sell you are stuck with what you get. Keep the 20 acres and rent the house out.

I don’t know what breed of deer hunter you have out your way but 20 acres to hunt on is laughable, unless they feed the deer and shoot them at the feeder?

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I don’t know what breed of deer hunter you have out where you are but lots of people hunt on less land than that with out baiting. Heck, where I live feeding white tail deer at all is not allowed.

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I have to agree with the others - the only way to prevent someone you don’t like from buying that house, either now or in the future, is to not sell at all.

Renting has its own issues, of course, and renters can trash a place pretty quickly - and be difficult to get rid of. I understand why you don’t want to do that.

Could you sell the house to be moved, and then turn the property into part of your farmland? There are people who look for nice houses to move to their own property - they get sick of living in a mobile home, or don’t want the cost of building new. Get it inspected, make sure it’s structurally sound, and then advertise it ‘to be moved.’ Buyers are then responsible for all moving costs, permits, etc. and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

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You can arrange with a real estate agent that you want to have prospective buyers over for dinner and get to know them prior to agreeing to sell. I know one couple who purchased a home this way. It was because the sellers wanted to make sure the buyers would be good neighbours in the community.

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The people who bought 7acres adjacent to my property, on their first year there, baited with bags of corn and shot deer from their back porch. Neighbors complained and we don’t think they’ve done so since. They also hunted into the back of this property…sat on a rock outcropping at the edge of theirs and shot from that vista down into this one. Good news is that guy is too old now to go wandering off into the woods.

Well, if that’s the type of “hunter” you get in your area…I can see why you don’t like “hunters”.

I live in Vermont. Baiting is illegal. So is use of any kind of lures using scents. There are also all kinds of regulations around how far away from a residential property you have to be to take a deer, it’s illegal to shoot from a vehicle/from the roadside…it’s pretty strict. People do utilize game cams, etc, but if you want to get a deer (or any other legal wildlife) you need a permit and you’re going to be out in the wilderness.

Any hunter I know hates the types of hunter you’re talking about and doesn’t consider them real “hunters”. It’s a bit of a purist perspective - one I happen to agree with - but I realize that doesn’t help you much with your quandary.

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I will second this.

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You could sell to a non-hunter…who might in turn sell it on in a couple of years to someone who does hunt. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Realistically there is no way you can sell a property and then tell the new owners what they can and cannot do.
Keep it, rent just the house, or sell off the house and one acre. Seems those are the only viable options.

well let me bring up Deed Restrictions again… this Saturday I received a packet representing a developer trying to remove deed restrictions on the three lots they are attempting to buy… the lots in our survey have restrictions from 1948 restricting houses must have at least 1800 sq/ft on the first floor. To remove the restrictions they need 60% of us to approve… ain’t going to happen

The proposed development is a townhouse development of 45 units on 6.5 acres…flew through the city approval process ignoring all public objections…

But these deed restrictions have stopped the developer’s funding.

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Are deed restrictions something that can work? Yes. However, enforcing deed restrictions is a private matter, this cannot be emphasized enough. Which means that the OP would have to bear the costs of enforcing the deed restriction in court. And in my experience, a deed restriction against hunting, i.e. ‘enjoyment of property’ is highly unlikely to be seen with favor in the court if you are in a county that by large considers that to be a reasonable use of property (which it sounds the OP is). It is an expensive and uncertain way to ensure that no hunting occurs. It might work. It might also require the OP to end up in court with some spectacular lawyer’s fees, an oppositional settlement, and a neighbor that hates their guts. I’d split the house off on a teeny tiny lot or rent before I went that route.

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I agree that deed restrictions are a powerful tool, but “funding” is a key point here-- the only entities that really care about following them are corporate types who need title insurance, investors, major bank loans, etc. Encumbrances on real estate that’s transferred between two private homeowners will carry a lot less punch. If the new owner wants to flout the deed restrictions, OP would have to invest a lot of time and negative energy proving the violations and then filing suit. It’d be a nasty drawn-out affair.

@eightpondfarm the farmstead split to separate out the house from the fields is probably your best bet to extract at least a little money from this deal without getting the kind of neighbor you’re worried about. (If it’s even allowed-- around here, it’s only a farmstead split if the parent farm is >40ac and has never been subdivided before.

But honestly, with a very small (by today’s stds) house, and given elderly residents it’s probably quite dated in style and layout. This house, without the full parcel, is not going to command a good price, in fact you stand a real chance of destroying a lot of the value of that inheritance.

I’d advise holding onto the land because it’s clear that it’s very important to you how your neighbors use their land. So this gift of 20 additional acres to shield you from neighbors is pretty huge.

I would offer the house to the fire department to do a training burn and then pay to have the building site completely cleared. (Or like someone else suggested, sell the house to be moved). Clearing the house away will reduce the property tax burden and keep it from falling into disrepair. You could rent out the fields as cattle pasture, if that’s a thing around your area. Or look into whether the land has any conservation value–might be possible to enroll it in one of the USDA grant programs. Lots of states have grants for prairie restoration, pollinator habitat, etc. If the site has wetlands or qualities that would make it suitable for wetlands, there are companies that look for “wetland banking” opportunities – land that they can convert into a wetland, to make up for some wetland they’re destroying elsewhere, such as for a pipeline or roads project.

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