Permit 'Light' Property

As I've covered in some of my previous posts there can be quite a few gotchas when looking for land and a lot of due diligence is required. The flip side is that if your land exists in the 'right' county you can have a lot of flexibility with it once purchasing. For example the county where we're looking at buying land currently doesn't require any building permits, the only requirement when building on the land is the septic system. If the county/state where you're looking doesn't require that gray water is captured you have the added bonus. So if you run something like composting toilets you could build without a septic and be permit free

If you have some flexibility on geographic location I would recommend you spend some time assessing the differences between counties where you're looking. Is it that I'm against building quality structures, no, I'm against obsessive government intrusion in my life. We live in a day where some people are scared of people who do things without a permit as if they're doing inferior work which is absolutely incorrect. The old saying, "A house built to code is the worst house you can build" which seems appropriate for this conversation. In my time living in the city I've seen plenty of jobs that passed permitting requirements but the work was horrendous. If you're thinking, "Well Joe, what do you have to hide" your mind is skewed and you're not looking at things clearly. Without appearing to be some anti-government redneck suffice it to say that I believe this country was founded on some amazing principles and as we add to them we've created an environment where people abdicate thinking to those feeding the cash to the politicians.