If I Had to Start Over From Scratch, Here's Exactly How I Would Buy 20 Acres of Land in One Year

There were rats living in the walls of the first property I ever bought.

Not one rat. RATS.

In the walls, in the crawl space, and one of them decomposing under my dishwasher for who knows how long while I made my dinner a few feet away.

That was my introduction to real estate.

Now my husband and I buy about 100 acres of land a year.

So if you’re in this “someday we’ll get some land” loop, and it’s a dream that feels far away, stay with me for a second.

Because if I can go from rats in the walls to buying land for a living, then the jump isn’t as big as it looks. Promise.

And real quick, because I want to know I’m talking to the right person…

I'm not gonna teach you how to flip land or build a land empire. What I’m sharing here is for the family that wants land but also…some extra pocket change.

Okay, so let’s get into it. First, a little backstory.

I sold my first company in my 20s. And I took some of that money and used it as a down payment on a multifamily in Chicago. DO NOT RECOMMEND buying a rental property in Chicago, but that’s another story for another day, lol.

I wanted to house hack, which is basically living there for free. Live in one unit, rent the other ones out. And it worked. My payment ended up being decent, somewhere between $6-800 a month, which, in Chicago, is no small thing.

Real estate was kind of in my blood, honestly, I just didn’t see it that way. My mom immigrated here from Nigeria in the eighties, and she raised my brother and me mostly on her own while working as an ICU nurse, 7a-7p.

She didn’t really start buying real estate until her mid 30s, and I watched her build a whole portfolio. And you wanna know what I thought as a kid? BORINGGGGG.

I wanted to travel the world. After college, I was going to a different country almost every other weekend. The last thing I wanted was a house and a picket fence, like, you’re not going anywhere.

So I bought this multifamily thinking it was a good move financially, and it mostly was. A few months after I purchased the property, I renovated my unit. I’m a little bougie. I like nice things. And the unit was a little too “dated” for me.

And then there was this smell.

I couldn’t figure it out. I had never smelled anything like it before, so I had no reference point for what it even was. Just this smell. In my nice new, renovated apartment.

Turns out the previous owner had a rat problem and never disclosed it at the closing table (eye roll). The contractors who were doing the renovation pulled the little panel under the dishwasher, and there it was. A rat. Stuck on one of those sticky pads. Decomposing. It had been there long enough that I’d been making all my meals on the counter above it.

GROSS.

For the rest of the time I lived there, I basically didn’t. I literally only went home to put my head on the pillow, and that was it. Because it got worse.

Pest control came out and pulled a mama rat the size of a raccoon out of the crawl space under the house. Rats were climbing through the walls. They were climbing through the walls.

Me. The bougie girl who renovated her unit so it would be nice. Living in a house with rats in the walls.

I literally have no words.

But you know what? that little property built up equity. It brought in income, especially after I got married and moved out, and we filled my old unit with another tenant. We got rid of the rats. And for how long I had it, it ended up being a great property.

And we still believe in that kind of real estate. Single family. Multifamily. We plan to keep buying it. Because it was never land OR a house for us. You can do both.

At the end of the day, land is different. It’s given us so much more freedom than that multifamily ever did. And we didn’t go looking for it, honestly. God placed it in front of us, put us in the right rooms at the right time, and I’m just so thankful this is our story.

When you buy land instead of a house, it feels like a much further jump. There’s no house on it. There’s no site, no utilities hooked up. You’re trying to figure out, wait, do I have to grade this? What about permits? It just seems like a lot.

And sometimes it is. But if you know what you’re doing, it’s really not. It’s just a different language.

If I was starting over, with nothing, and I wanted to buy 20 acres in a year, this is exactly what I would do.

What kind of land do you actually want?

Do you want sabbatical land you visit on the weekends? Do you want a little family homestead where you grow your own food? A farm? You have to get clear on that first.

Here are some working definitions of the five types of land you can choose from. Most fall into this bucket.

• Family Homestead. Productive land, but it’s not a business. You work the soil, you just don’t farm it for income. This is typically what most families choose. Usually somewhere around 5 to 30 acres.

• Working Homestead. The committed version, where the land is THE WORK, not the lifestyle. Real crop sales, livestock, dairy, a vineyard. This is where one or both of you leaves a job to do it full time.

• Heritage Estate. Bigger, more beautiful, less about production. Historic structures, mature trees, maybe some water. The land is the backdrop. It’s gorgeous, but it’ll humble you on upkeep if you buy it for the photos and forget about the taxes, lol.

• Sabbatical Land. A retreat. You keep your house and you go here for the weekend/holidays. The one rule: keep it close enough that you’ll actually use it, or it just becomes a mortgage you can’t stand.

• Compound. Land big enough, and set up deliberately enough, for a few generations to live on at once. Parents in one house, adult kids in another, grandparents in a third. Often siblings pool their money to buy together, which is one of the most underrated ways into land there is.