Let's Build A House!

Join Jess and Rich as they share their journey of buying land at a tax auction and building a house from scratch. Discover the step-by-step process, challenges, and insights into creating affordable, customized homes in rural New York.

The living you podcast is a conversation about life, real estate, and the journey of living you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

All right. So this is going to be what Rich calls our special edition pod.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Bonus pod.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Our bonus pod, our living you media brand, uh is going out on the road. No. That's that's something else. So one of the things, uh, I think we just want to give a quick uh preface into what we're gonna talk about today. Um we talked about when we talk about different real estate, we talk about the market, we talk about all these kinds of things. And Rich and I both share a love of real estate uh for many reasons. One of them being, you know, the low inventory kind of situation, trying to solve for how do we create affordable housing? Um, we've been talking about that for a couple of years, and I think it kind of gave birth to this really nutso thought we had why don't we buy some land or buy an old house or buy something and build a house and see what that might be like? Um and then there was a tax auction earlier this year in 2026, and Jess is known to throw down at the craps table and uh this kind of little um before you know auction had me clicking like uh throwing dice, like uh no whammies, no whammies. Um so we bought three tax auction properties. Um, and part of the whole podcast, I think, anyway, that the thought was to go through the building process because people ask me all the time, and and Rich sells a lot of land and he has conversations like this all the time, and people are very curious. What if I just buy land and build something? What does that look like? So we hear it a lot in rural upstate New York. Um, and we're we decided to kind of pull the trigger and go through it. So we were gonna discuss that a little bit, um, just have a nice organic kind of conversation. Um, we'll see what kind of shape it takes. Um But if you are interested at all in possibly building a house at some point in your life and you want to know the process, we want to share our process and we will be sharing a lot more. This is kind of just a preliminary overview of maybe where we are, what we're doing. Um, but we wanna we wanna unveil it. We want to take the mystery out, we want to share process. So if you want to build a house, you absolutely should.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Yeah, just I didn't mean to cut across you right there, but yeah, great intro. I think I think part of why we want to talk about it is because it's what we talk about, right? So part of part of what our pod is is this living you, this this idea is that it's it's what it's the what what's going on in our lives. Guess what? Off camera, you and I are trying to build a house. So there's a lot of conversations that are taking place that are about this process that we haven't really put into the public sphere or been really public about. And um now's the time to just kind of talk about what we've learned. Now we are in the very infinitesimally baby steps of this process. We don't have a structure sitting in front of us or anything like that, but we've thought a lot about it. Um, I've spent years and years getting to this point of being you know mentally, financially uh prepared for this journey. And you and I both hope that this is not a one-off. We hope that we can find find a way to do this such that we create something attractive, uh you know, efficient, quality, and and desirable, and and that becomes something that we can maybe do on a on a regular basis. And I don't know if that means like I don't know if does that make us builders or developers? I don't know. All I know is that I we talk about our specific area of the country and how there isn't a lot of new new home construction in America is interesting. You need jobs and and and and a sustainable, you know, economic footprint to to build large neighborhoods. But there are people in our area that are always choosing between right now. We just talked last week, last pod about average price keeps going up around here. Well, guess what? At some point, the the average existing home price is gonna catch up kind of to what you could get if you built it on your own. Now, maybe not quite you know on par, but if you think about a 2026 built home, it's gonna be by and large a much, much, much better home than a 1975 ranch that you buy for 285 grand. So when you think about what our particular market has to offer, the the buying pool, we think we haven't proven it yet, but we think that there might be a way to to cust you know to create one-off homes that are both you know relatively affordable, um and you know, would be much better, would much better homes. The go the the quality of construction has gone up so much in the last, you know, every every year it gets better. But anyway, so that's our journey. Our journey is to try to crack this code. Whether we do it successfully or not is still to be determined, but we are in the first phases of our first build, and we're learning a lot every single day. And it's exciting. It's taking a lot of our mental bandwidth, but that's what we wanted to do because we want to learn this, know this, be better at it, be and and either show you how you can do it yourself, or you know, or do it for you. Or do it for you. Yeah, or do it for you.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, you call me up and I'll build your house.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

That's what I want. That's really really at the end of the day. I mean, what did we say on one of my amazing quotes from an earlier pod? Your home is where your life lives.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Uh-huh. You're so innumered with yourself for that one.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Such a silly thing to say. But no, it was actually I was like, actually, yeah, my home is where my life lives. You know what?

SPEAKER_00 6:01

I'm pretty it turns out I'm pretty clever.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Yeah. A wise woman once said, Oh, which wise woman is that? Well, that would be me. Um, no, but your house is where your life lives, and it has to function for you. And, you know, even just like kind of talking about when we would do the market stuff or whatever, just talking about real estate in general, people go and they look at inventory and they pick a house that basically works for them. Um, it's not perfect the day you buy it, you make it perfect. And what if you could build a house exactly the way you want it to function for your life? Um so that's an interesting concept. And it used to be back in the day that, you know, I mean, back back in the day, right? You what they found land and then they just started building out of whatever they had. People built their own stuff, and people say, Oh, my house is built by my great grandfather. I love that. That's wonderful. Um, and we don't have that skill anymore. We've lost that. We've kind of, you know, pushed that out to um, you know, another industry uh was born, and other people do that, and it's called leverage. Wonderful, just like a supermarket or anything else. We've kind of lost the basic skills on how to survive on our own, and that's another pod. And I want to recapture that. The mystery of building a house is shh interesting to me. Um, they sell houses all day, but you know, I want to know how it goes together, um, and all the different factors and how to customize it and how to make it really perfect and beautiful. And I'm I'm obsessed with the aesthetic of things, you know. So some people can have they could build whatever and then they're not worried about how beautiful it is, but you know, for me, the aesthetic of it, the function of it, all those things, the style, all go together. And uh, so it's just an interesting um thing. But if we can take the mystery out of it for you, that's what we want to do.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a it's an exciting process. It's it's also complicated. Let's not sugarcoat it. It's complicated, and we're only we're only starting. But um, there's a lot of moving pieces, and that's why most I would say most people probably are there's a lot more questions than there are answers, I think a lot of times, and a lot of like, well, who would I ask about this, or who do I go to for this?

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

It's one foot in front of the other so to build your own house is is not for the faint of heart or for the the time constrained, I will put it that way. Because there is uh there's a fair bit of of your own personal time and and thinking that goes into it.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

And money. Um definitely you want to have money, but let's talk about the steps we've been through and maybe how we've kind of gotten where we are. Um shed some light. You want to start with the tax auction? Sure. So land acquisition, property acquisition.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

So you start obviously with with some real property, right? In order to build something, you need to own well, you should own it. Um, and there are conventional means. There are the there's the real estate market, there's often land for sale by owner in some circumstances. Uh sometimes there are developers who will, in our area, I say we don't build homes. We do have developers who buy and subdivide and sell land. And those are that's a very viable option. It's usually a little bit of a premium, but also they've been recently surveyed, they have uh perk tests. You know, there's a lot of things that are good about that process, and that I I think is a good thing. And this is a different topic altogether, but some people say, you know, why why carve up our old historic farmsteads and hillsides? Well, frankly, humans have been manipulating land for forever, as long as we've been a thing. Uh, so just to suddenly stop because of some I hear I I get on this, sorry, I did this whole I get on this whole side tangent with like solar farms and whatnot, and people are like, you can't cover our beautiful farmland with with solar panels. It's like, bro, chill. It's only been farmland for like 150 years out of out of four million, you know. So like just back up a little bit. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Um Although they could put solar panels on parking lots, they can.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Everyone says that, but also yeah, of course. That's the the the people don't whatever. People don't think about drainage and stuff like that because they think they have all the answers. They don't think about um where does the water go that falls off the solar panels and onto the anyway. Um, the bottom line is everything's complicated. And that wasn't the point of the podcast. We weren't gonna go into in solar farms.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

I just uh somehow we got into solar farms.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

I get jacked up when people just propose like an alternate solution without thinking it through, right? Anyway, um it was about land, it was about land use and how starting to build a house starts with getting some land, right? That was how that was how we got there.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Or buying a house, buying a fixer upper, or buying what we did, which we bought three houses that um actually you should talk about the house you bought. Uh, but buying three houses that I'm scared to go back to the house that I bought.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

I haven't been there.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

No, we so probably one of my favorite things about this process was Rich's face when we went to look at his house in Lawrence for the first time. He said, We got we gotta, we gotta, you guys gotta come to our YouTube channel. We're gonna get everything up on there, I promise. But he said his face. He was so sad because literally the basement was completely flooded. He had an indoor swimming pool, and he looks at the camera and he says, Why why are you filming my demise? Just one of the greatest pieces of media you will ever see. Um, because that's what we did. You buy a house at tax auction, it's not pretty. Um, and probably all three of them are teardowns, although Rich's house in Lauren's is most likely probably in the best shape that could possibly be salvaged, as long as the floor is not mushy and you don't fall into the basement. Um, that one might be salvageable. But the other two, specifically, we are we have the one that we're we started that we decided is probably the best of the three to start because it has a little bit more land, it has an opportunity to purchase some acreage next door, uh, which we're working on. Uh little single wide trailer uh up on a hill. It's got a beautiful view, it's a very rural spot. It's four minutes from my house in Maryland, New York, and uh it kind of has the best potential. Um and it's a teardown. So that's okay. That's what you get at tax auction. So that was kind of how we started, knowing that an existing house already has a well, right? So that was something that was important. Already, someone's already lived there. There's already electric, there's basically a driveway. Uh, you know, it's a tear down, but you know, some of the systems being there, we'll have to do a septic. But that was kind of I don't want to say the easy button because every every every purchase or every opportunity is going to have its challenges. But buying land, and Rich knows better than me, if you just buy land, you've got to put all those things in, right? So there's a there's a there's a process and there's cost, driveway, electric, you know. Can you even get electric there? I've heard people say, like, I, you know, they've bought some. I don't even know if you can get electric here. Did you see a pole on the block somewhere? So yeah, you gotta know if you can even get the things you need to that property.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Yep. These are this is this is great, these are great points. This is all stuff. So even before everyone thinks home is is the house, but the the real property starts with the land, and then of course you start with the systems that the the home uses to to be appropriate, right? That is your water supply, that's your waste system, and that's generally your your power supply as well, and your access. So you nailed all the key things. The thing when you buy a raw piece of raw land, Jess, is you don't generally have almost any of it, or you might have a little bit here and there. Maybe you might have a little driveway, just goes into some clearing in the woods. Wow, great. You got a driveway and a clearing. Now you've still got to do a well, you've still got to do a septic system, all that stuff. So it adds up. It's time consuming to think about. Um, so the so I I agree with the easy button part. First of all, um, in our area there are a fair number of unpaid tax properties. So there are some properties that do every year go up to these tax auctions. A couple of our counties around here have not actually had a tax auction in a long time. Um there's been some I think there's basically some county level I think it all stemmed from COVID and some I I don't remember the exact reason, but Delaware County in particular, Jess, hasn't had a tax auction, I think, since 2020 or 2021. So there's probably a lot of properties on that tax roll that are gonna be available at some point.