Hi guys, new here, wanted to ask a few questions.
I’ve got some land that I purchased years ago, and I’m trying to determine if I should keep it, leave it, or do anything with it?
1st Property - Southern New Mexico. I bought a piece of property about ~19 years ago. I really didn’t know what I was doing, I was about 19 or 20 years old at the time. I paid $1,200 for it with title, and everything else. The land is only listed as having a value of $500. I pay about $14 a year in taxes. The city just laid a brand new road, freshly paved that runs right by it. The property also has another road which runs along the other side of it, and that’s unpaved, but easily traversed. $14 a year in taxes doesn’t kill me, and I get almost all of the $14 off on my taxes. The place where it’s located in New Mexico is not a huge town, but it’s relatively populated and it is “growing.” There are no liens on the property, and it’s deeded Residential, but I’m told by the appraiser that it can also be used for commercial should I choose. It has power / water / phone access. I’ve visited this lot when I was on vacation, and it’s cleared. The surrounding area has well-kept upper-middle income homes of retirees. It’s 5 minutes from a major highway, and 1/2 mile from a State Road.
2nd Property - South Central Florida. I bought this piece of property about 14 years ago. I also didn’t really fully know what I was doing. I paid ~$21,000 w/ title and taxes for the property. It’s a 2.5 acre property located off a canal (borders it on two sides). It has an unpaved road that runs along two sides, with a paved road about 100 meters down the road. The property is uncleared, but mostly has scrub trees and saw palmettos and sabal palms. The property was originally worth $21k, but then the very next year after I bought it, they did something called “Wetland Mitigation,” and they lowered the value of the property to about $3,700. I spoke to the appraiser, who got me in touch with the Geotechnical manager. He said they flagged the property to meet some “wetland mitigation” requirement the state required. He stated that should I want to build on it, which I would be allowed to… I would just need to get a geotechnical evaluation of the property. He believed that the property is perfectly fine, but it was flagged just because it was next to a canal and there was no structures on it. He said he’d be more than happy to move it back to full valuation, but that it would raise my taxes considerably, and he didn’t understand why I’d want to do that. So I told him to leave it. Currently, I pay ~$149 a year in taxes on that property. If he changed the designation, the taxes would likely go up to around $700 annually. Though, the property value would go up too. There are a few people living out there, mostly farmers and some people who have built some work shops and some industrial. It’s coded for multi-use (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) and there are no liens on the property. It also has power / water / phone access available. There’s even a post there with an old power meter that’s disconnected right now. The area is growing, but not very quickly. It’s north of Lake Okeechobee, but there’s no boat access or anything like that.
With everything I’ve said… what should I do with this property? Is it worth it for me to sell either of them? Do I just hang on to them? I’m not hard up for cash, so I can hold on to them, just wondering if it’s even worth my time keeping them when I consider the taxes I pay.