Why owning the right property matters more now that ever

I’m sure you have noticed that the state of our world seems to have changed. If you asked ten people, you’d probably get 12 different answers about why that is the case. This post is not about the why; it’s about what you can do about it. In the grand scheme of things, there’s very little you and I can do about what happens with crime, the economy, and the conflicts between nations. However, when it comes to providing a safe place for your family, we can do something about that.

You may have heard that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are building bunkers. Most of us will not be following his lead, I’m sure. What we can do, though, is find a place that is less vulnerable to crime and social unrest. Most of us are tied to a geographic location because of our job or family. If you have the resources and the freedom of movement, you can get a 20+ acre place in the country. However, if you need to stay close to where you work, sometimes getting property in a sparsely developed community will significantly increase your protection.

Let me share a story from my life that helps illustrate this. When my wife and I were newly married, we bought a 25-foot by 30-foot house. The property was only 40 feet wide, which meant we had 5 feet of land on either side of our home. We did not have air conditioning, so to keep cool, we kept the windows and doors open for ventilation. On more than one occasion, we would sit at our kitchen table listening to what happened in the lives of our neighbors, who were sitting at their kitchen table about 18 feet away.

The crime rate in our neighborhood got increasingly worse over the 12 years we lived there. The last straw was when the store owner down the street was killed during a robbery in the middle of the afternoon, and the shooter dropped his jacket at the end of our alley. I had no idea what was happening when I crawled out from underneath the car I was working on in the alley and noticed police everywhere. Had I come out a few minutes earlier, I likely would have been shot by the robber in his effort to eliminate a witness.

This event was the third shooting within three blocks of our home in the prior three years. At the time, we had three kids under ten, and we were afraid to let them go out and play. About a year later, we moved to a different part of town that was not as isolated as we had wanted. We had wanted to move to the country, but that wasn’t possible. But simply getting onto an acre of ground with the neighbors at a distance was a great move in the right direction.

Our new neighbors were far enough away to give us the privacy we sought. The neighbor behind us is over 500 feet away. We had room for our kids to play in the yard, and we even had a garden. I distinctly remember the first time we sat down at our dining room table, and I looked down the table at my family and then out into the backyard at that vast open space; it truly hit me how glad I was to have them in a safer, more relaxed location. At that moment, I experienced a relief that surpassed what I had expected. It surprised me; I didn’t realize how significant a burden I had been carrying until right then. At this point, that’s almost 25 years ago, and I can still remember that sense of relief that I felt that day.

As the world continues to change, this desire to move to safer areas is increasing. We are always looking for properties in both rural areas and subdivisions with more significant properties. Many of these subdivisions have empty properties, making them feel more remote while still being close to town. This ability to have open space is at the heart of what we want to accomplish for our customers here at Land Squared. We want to help people find a better environment or a place to get away to on the weekends.

A big challenge is that once we find a property, it can be gone quickly once we list it with a realtor. If you would like to find out about our new properties before we make them available to the public, sign up for our Pre-Release Property List, and we will notify you of any new properties before we put them on the open market. If we sell properties from this list, we discount them by 5% because of our reduced cost.