House hunting in Florida

People here like their property. Do they ever. They want some big dollars, maybe the size of dollars back when you could go down to the bank and turn in that piece of green paper for its equivalent in silver, and before FDR took control of banks and such, you could get the equivalent in gold.

Big dollars.

For example, my wife and I looked at a parcel a few blocks from Kathleen’s house, 3.25 acres of tall grass and half a dozen oak trees with Spanish moss. $149,900. That’s $46,123 an acre.

There are three other lots in the same neighborhood, two 2-acre lots and one 3.14-acre plat, with the same dollar-per-acre price.

Anybody who buys the land has to clear grass and some trees and then bring in a bunch of truckloads of fill to raise the house location above the flood area. So, there is a better than $200,000 outlay before even laying out lines for a house.

And … parts of three lots are designated for wetlands preservation. No building or disturbing the water and weeds.

The area is quite nice, but we’ll have to look elsewhere