Writing this sure feels familiar. Was it four years ago I wrote here about the urge to buy land? In fact, that was also in October! That was when I purchased a piece of land up on the Colorado Plateau in eastern Arizona, just below the Navajo Nation. I’ve been thinking about that today since my brother Dana and his wife Claudia have been traveling around the west this year, and paid a visit to my little piece of land today while visiting the nearby Petrified Forest National Park.
So why not do it all again, but here in the Philippines? For a few months, Eden and I have been looking for a piece of property here to buy and build a house. The easy thing to do would be to buy a lot in a subdivision, so of course we are not going to do that. For myself, I am not a city person and would very much rather have some space around me. For Eden, well… Eden is a farmer at heart. She needs to grow things. To plant and to tend and to harvest. And owning land and being able to grow your own food gives one a deep level of security.
All that being so, we’ve been looking for a piece of land out in the province, away from the city but still close enough that it’s reasonable to come into town to buy things we can’t get out in the province. We are also constrained by budget, so we’ve mostly been looking at properties out on the unpaved barangay roads. We’ve seen some beautiful pieces of property, but they were never quite right. One was so far out into the mountains we needed 4WD low on the truck just to get there, and we could never do it if it were raining. Others were too expensive for our budget.
Finally, we found a nice 2.25 hectare (a bit over 5 1/2 acres) lot in Barotac Viejo, just outside of town, that looks like it is going to fit our needs. We’ve visited the lot twice, did some arms-length negotiating with the owner via the agent, then finally had a sit down meeting with the owner to work out the final details.
The system for buying and selling real estate here isn’t as regulated and structured as it is in the West. Basically, you have to look out for yourself because nobody else is going to. So we hired an attorney and had him check the title for the property and that all the taxes were up to date. Yesterday we had a surveying company out to survey the lot and confirm the property lines. We also need to talk to the barangay office and make sure what we think is the barangay road actually is.
The partner of one of Eden’s sisters is an engineer working for a building company, and he kindly came out yesterday and looked at the property with us. He confirmed my fear that the route to the spot where we want to build the house is too steep for a driveway and would require some cut and fill, as well as likely concreting of slopes to prevent collapse onto the driveway. The solution to that is to also purchase a smaller adjacent lot, which would allow a much more gradual approach, and also provide us with another 6/10 of a hectare of more level, cleared land. We made the owner an offer to buy both lots, and they’ve accepted. Isn’t it always the way with real estate that things creep up and you end up stretching to get a bit more? Anyway, if we have to spend more money we’d rather spend it for more land rather than more concrete.
If things keep moving in a positive direction, sometime in the near future we will be the owners of a little piece of Panay Island! I long ago gave up trying to predict how long it takes to do anything here in the Philippines, so the most I can say is “soon”. And then the real fun will start; building a house. That should be worth a few more grey hairs.
Stay tuned…
Here are a bunch of photos taken during the survey yesterday:
