Land Enquiries (and a business plan?)

[Tonbogiri]

This is rather important, chaps!

I am about to embark on my journey into real estate. The plan is to at least find a few likely places that we would be likely to use.
My search shall of course be restricted to sub-tropics to warm temperate climate (unless any major objections...), but I will need to get into contact with a number of agents.
Seeing as to be taken seriously by them, you need either to be famous or have a development project, I was planning on telling them the following:

Hi, I'm Tom Cruise. I represent a group of businessmen who are looking to develop a sustainable eco-village alongside a outdoors skills awareness program that could lead to a permanent wilderness camping organisation nearby. With this in mind, we would prefer land that is undeveloped, with enough natural resources (i.e. water, game) to maintain a group of around 20-25 residents at any one time.

Sounds pretty good, no? We will need to draw up a more detailed version of what we are going to do, however.

Back to land; Am I thinking that 100 or 200 acres of land would be enough? I am imploring for help from farmers, folks. My enquiries will start on 2nd August, so any responses or issues better be raised quick.

[Tsteu'itan]

I'm glad that someone is at the point when they're able to start looking into this step, as it is very important.  I just worry that it may be a little too soon for people to have had time to develop the funds.  Most were looking at a timetable of 4-5 years.

Still, if you were able to get something this early, that would probably be extremely encouraging to the members and help bring back the enthusiasm from those who may have lost some faith in the project.

[Predict]

I have to agree with Tsteu about the funds. Also, at this point we don't know enough about our land requirements and I think we should make more progress regarding desirable countries before seeking actual land. We still need to establish how much land, what countries will allow this, vegetation we need, the list goes on.

At this stage what we really need to do is establish contacts, if you were to simply flag our interest that may be beneficial but any further would be counter productive.

Not that I'm trying to shoot down your idea but I seriously believe we should refrain from making any snap decisions, even if they encourage more members to join in the short term. It is far better to proceed gradually and make steady, measurable, and useful progress. For example, your recent research on tribes has highlighted many land requirements and limitations that we need to consider, and the need to establish our style of living (static or moving settlements).

If you want to move in this direction and do work on the business side of thing I would strongly encourage you to work on fund raising, no one has considered this yet and we need to establish some sort of budget first.

[Key'ìl Nekxetse]

I think finding out what is available would be a useful thing to do, as it could help with the location decision, and could help to work out what to do when we come to actually buying land.
On the subject of how to enquire, I don't like the idea of saying we're something we're not, we aren't business men. But to some extent at least, I suspect we'll have to do things that we don't really want to, and it is important to get noticed.

[Predict]

I think we should establish contacts. By which I mean, find who sells land where we are looking and like I said flag an interest. But we have to remember simply how large an area we are looking at, we could waste a lot of time in countries that wouldn't work.

Right now what we can say is we are looking for a large area of undeveloped rainforest, what would be valuable is to find who sell this type of land and where. I wouldn't go into actual pieces of land available as we don't have a good enough idea of how much we need. An idea of price per acre across various countries would be most valuable.

Also, we're looking in the tropics, with temperate regions as a back-up. So focus on tropic-subtropics.

Edit: If you say it's important to be famous (jokingly I know) but if first impressions are important there may be benefit in waiting until we are more organised and can approach the agents with more definite requirements, they may not take us seriously when we can't give them more information. If you can get in contact without too much effort though then great.

[guest2859]

Well, once upon a time, a list of islands was made. One of them was Clairview Island, Australia. I really like the way that's set up, but I can't say it's a good spot because I forgot all the specs for it.

[Predict]

If we can find land in Australia it would be ideal. It's tropical, there's rainforest and island and almost no diseases (odd bit of dengue, hardly ever).

What I am trying to say, Tonbogiri, is that we need your business plan first. I really think all we can do with land agents at the moment is to make contact and ask for some generic pricing, try to establish some guiding prices, per hectare by country. Then we can form a budget and begin fund raising.  While we are fund raising we are finalizing our location (country specific) then we can return to the agents and look at actual property, knowing how much we can spend and where we are looking.  I've also been meaning to say: 2nd of August is a bit soon, don't want to do anything under prepared.

[Tonbogiri]

True, true.

Perhaps it would be best simply to have a more detailed look at land that is for sale simply to know what we are after?