Let's talk about Country Living

Sledge

Oooof!! Good thing you are savvy with using the maps that the county has!! You are miles ahead of anyone else looking for property in terms of knowledge!!

I had a crisis with insurance earlier this year...not flood, but get this....over my renovations. I have been redoing my house for 9 years, and the insurance co. decided they didn't like this, because I didn't have all the exterior siding on and was taking so long to finish it. Therefore they were supposedly worried about water damage claims. (I had to remove the upper storey stucco quite a while ago to raise the upper storey walls and put a new roof on.) The house, being 80 years old, is sheathed with rough 1" lumber on a diagonal, and looks like h*ll. To top it off, I sheathed the upper new walls with scraps of 3/4" plywood so it doesn't look so good either! And holding down a 9-5 for most of those years didn't leave a heck of a lot of time to work on the house...

With a mortgage, the bank wants insurance. Without insurance, the mortgage gets called. unh-oh!!

I couldn't buy construction insurance because I'm living in the house. I guess I didn't fit in the nice organized checkboxes they have on their questionairres down in the city. With the end of my old insurance days away, I finally found an old guy who did farm insurance who came out and inspected my spread. He said "it looks worse than it is" and mentioned the checkbox thing and the drones in the city. He said he works with the more senior (and practical) insurance guys in those same offices and gets past the idiocy. I had new insurance right away, at less cost that what I had been paying before.

Crisis past. (Phew!)

One idea: Could you investigate the flood areas and find something that is maybe is on the edge of a flood area where the expected flood may be shallow, and have a house pad built up to above the elevation of the maximum expected flood? I'll bet the flood maps are set up to a "100 year flood level" that is somewhat theoretical, because it is a flood that statistically is expected once every 100 years. So you could present a letter from an engineering firm who designed this earth platform to an insurance company telling them the house is located high enough to be above any potential floods. This might allow you to get some land with low value and leverage it into something that is worth a bunch!

I did this once on an industrial property for a hazardous chemical (PCB) storage facility. All we did was take a Cat and push up an earth platform several feet above the surrounding area, to the 100+ year flood level.



Jon.