Vacant Land and Lots in Tuscarawas County: What Buyers Actually Look For

Land looks like the simplest thing anyone can own. No roof, no furnace, no tenant calling on a Sunday. Just an acre or ten that came with the family farm, or the lot next door that somebody bought thirty years ago meaning to build.

Then it comes time to sell, and land turns out to be the harder sale. A buyer is not really pricing the ground. They are pricing what the ground will let them do, and almost none of that is visible from the road. Here is what somebody looking at your parcel is actually checking.

Whether the soil will take a septic system

In most of Tuscarawas County outside the villages, there is no sanitary sewer, which means a house needs its own sewage treatment system, and the system has to fit the dirt. Ohio does not take anyone's word for that. Under Ohio Administrative Code 3701-29-07, a site and soil evaluation has to be done by a certified soil scientist or another qualified evaluator, who digs borings on the property and describes every limiting condition down to sixty inches.

The part sellers rarely expect is that the evaluation has to find room for two systems, not one. The rule requires enough suitable area for a primary system and a replacement area on the same site, and it rules out slopes over twenty five percent, wetlands, bedrock outcrops, and buried drainage tile.

The Tuscarawas County Health Department walks new systems through a seven step process: soil evaluation, design, plan review and a site visit, a registered contractor, a permit to install before any work starts, and a final inspection. Their office is at 330-343-5550, and a call there before you list is worth more than any guess about what your ground will support.

That replacement area is also why the county raised its minimum size for new unsewered single family lots to 1.5 acres in 2016, after the state's on-lot sewage rules changed. A parcel that already carries a passing soil evaluation is a different product from one that does not, and it is the single best thing most sellers can put in a buyer's hands.

Whether it touches a road, and whether the county will let a driveway in

A landlocked parcel is not a bargain, it is a lawsuit waiting on an easement. Tuscarawas County's subdivision regulations set the minimum frontage for a lot at forty feet, or whatever township zoning requires if that number is higher, and the lot has to front an existing state, county, township, or municipal road.

Frontage alone is not access, though. Before a driveway goes in, an access permit application has to go to the Tuscarawas County Engineer. The location has to give adequate sight distance, and new connections have spacing rules, including staying at least thirty feet from an existing driveway and at least one hundred thirty feet from a public road intersection on the lowest volume classification. A buyer who has been through this once will stand at your road frontage and look both directions before they look at anything else.

Whether their bank will touch it

This one surprises almost everybody. A vacant lot cannot be bought with an ordinary mortgage. Fannie Mae's Selling Guide is explicit that it does not purchase or securitize mortgages on vacant land or land development properties, which takes the conventional loan most buyers know off the table.

What is left is a portfolio land loan from a local bank on the bank's own terms, seller financing, or cash. That explains why land sits longer than houses at the same price, and why serious land buyers so often show up with cash. The pool of people who can close is simply smaller.

Whether the tax picture changes when it sells

If your acreage has been enrolled in Current Agricultural Use Value, the tax bill reflects farm value rather than market value. When land comes out of agricultural use, Ohio Revised Code 5713.34 provides for a recoupment charge equal to the tax savings for the three tax years immediately before the conversion.

That charge is a real number in a buyer's math. Knowing it up front, and deciding out loud who is absorbing it, keeps it from surfacing as a surprise two weeks before closing.

Whether you actually own what is underneath

In this part of Ohio, sitting over the Utica shale, oil and gas rights were often severed from the surface generations ago. A title search will find it, and a buyer will ask. Ohio's Dormant Mineral Act, Ohio Revised Code 5301.56, gives a surface owner a path to reclaim a severed mineral interest that has sat unused for twenty years, but it is a formal process involving certified mail notice to the holder and a recorded affidavit of abandonment, not something that happens on its own.

Find out what your deed says before a buyer does. Selling surface only is completely normal here. Being unable to answer the question is what costs you the buyer.

What all of this adds up to

The easiest lot to sell is not the prettiest one. It is the one where somebody has already answered the questions: here is the soil evaluation, here is the frontage and the access classification, here is the CAUV status, here is what the deed says about the minerals.

If none of that is answered, the land does not become unsellable. It becomes a cash sale, priced for the buyer taking on the unknowns. That is a fair trade for a lot of families, especially when the parcel came along with an estate and nobody nearby wants to farm it or build on it.

Not sure whether your lot is worth the trouble of finding out?

If you are holding land in Tuscarawas County that you did not choose and do not use, you do not have to run the soil evaluation and the title work yourself just to find out what it is worth. RCB Rentals is local, we buy land and lots as they are, and we are glad to tell you what we see in a parcel even if you decide to keep it.

Get a no-obligation cash offer, or read how we handle farmhouses and rural property here in Tuscarawas County. No pressure either way.