The land of opportunity

It all started innocently enough. We had some money from an unusually good tax return. The stock market and interest rates were both falling, making our usual investment options seem less desirable. The price of land and housing was also falling, but that felt more like an opportunity. We could buy a little piece of land and maybe put a second home on it. Construction had nearly ground to a halt in metro Phoenix, where we live. So our plan seemed doable.

We looked for a long time. Prices were still a lot higher than we had hoped. Plus, we had a few criteria. The land had to be within two hours from home (or we'd never go there), it should be a higher elevation (so we could escape the blistering heat of the desert in summer) and it had to be off the major highways (or we'd have to fight the traffic created by people escaping the heat along with us).

Finally, we thought we found the perfect place. It was on the outskirts of a little mining community an hour and a half away. It was only 10 degrees or so cooler than Phoenix, but it had a newly remodeled farm house, a barn that would make a cool renovation project and was surrounded by National Forest land. We were so sold on this place, we almost didn't drive to Peeple's Valley, halfway between Wickenburg and Prescott, to check out a piece of land Gerald had seen advertised on the Internet. We went just to make sure we weren't missing something really great.

The advertised land was a nice piece of property, with pinyon pines in a lovely valley. Unfortunately, it also overlooked a cluster of unattractive mobile homes. The seller introduced us to his Realtor, Dorman Olsen, at Hilltop Realty in nearby Yarnell. We looked all over Peeple's Valley that morning. Had lunch, then Dorman took us to phase 3 of what used to be Ruger Ranch, a development of 36-acre parcels.

That's when we fell in love. Dorman drove us all over the land, mostly to lots on the tops of ridge lines. They were beautiful. But after climbing up a hill so steep that Dorman feared his car wouldn't make it, I wondered what we would do up there. True, we could see for 360 degrees. But then what? The peak was so steep, we couldn't even walk around. I'm all for hiking, but I wanted it to be a choice. 

On the way, Dorman had pointed to some preserved ranch relics, a windmill and a barn in a little meadow. I thought it was lovely. "What about that land?" I asked. "Is that for sale, too?" 

He said it was, though he had no information about it. We drove back down and stood on the edge of the meadow that overlooked a ruined tin barn. It was early fall and the meadow still had that thick green look of late summer. The afternoon sun tinted everything with a golden hue. I fell in love.

We asked Dorman to find out the price, and he called Gerald on Monday. Gerald called me. "How much do you think it's listed for?" he asked. I guessed the top of the range of the other parcels we had been looking it. Then he told me it was listed for less money than any other parcel for sale in phase 3. What's more, the owner was a California investor who was desperate to get out from under it. We couldn't believe it.

We brought up our neighbors the next weekend to see if they would be interested in splitting the lot with us. They were. At the end of the negotiations, we bought the land for exactly what the owner had paid for it three years earlier, in 2004. We were feeling pretty smart.