Ever been curious about land investing? We followed along land investor, developer, engineer, and cash flow creator Gary MacDermid to see what his more recent project was all about. The following is a transcription of our first chat with Gary, if you’re interested in watching the video you can click here.
[0:07]
Emily: Hi, everyone, I’m Emily with Dynamic. And I’m here with Gary, we are on site. And as you can see, there’s a lot of action going on behind us. So we’re gonna tell you a little bit about it. Gary, tell us first about yourself and a little bit about this land. What is this development project about?
[0:26]
Gary: Yeah, great. This is basically, we’re in San Tan Valley, we’ve been working on this for a bit of time, we started with 9.26 acres, something like that, we split it up. And so right now, we’re working on four lots, because you can put a well, and if you use government back, if you want to offer government back financing like USDA, VA, FHA, to your buyers, the new homeowners, you can only share a well between four lots. So that’s what we’re working on today. It looks as if we’re probably going to be drilling to 700 feet, they’ve been going at it for a couple days and should finish up hopefully this afternoon.
[1:05]
Emily: Awesome. 700 feet, that’s incredible. And so you said there’s four lots, so they’re going to share the well. How did you go about like, gaining authorization? Did you need to get a permit for like a shared well, or is it different? You know, for different types of wells, how did you go about getting that permission?
[1:24]
Gary: Right. So basically, in most cases, the well driller takes care of the permitting. So we submit a little site plan, the parcel number, and then they take care of that getting that approvals with the state and the county. And then that’s basically, once they get the permission, and we’ll put that in, and then they’re gonna put the pump next week, we’ll get a pump completion report. And that’s the basic process. Yeah.
[1:48]
Emily: Okay. And so what about like, other wells in the area, or any type of like, you know, are there any setback requirements or distancing requirements? How did you determine like, where exactly, you could put the well?
[2:03]
Gary: Right. Okay, so, we did do a lot of research before we picked a location. And that was, so in Arizona, there’s a well registry, so they have a GIS mapping system. And you can kind of see all of the wells, all the register wells in the state. And you can take a look at each of the wells in the area. So you can get an idea for who’s drilling the wells, how deep they’re going, where they’re finding the water, what level the water is at. And also you can see if there’s a pump completion report, that sort of thing. And then once we’ve dug the well, what we wanted to do is, we’re putting this, try to keep it centrally located, so that it’s easier to share between the four lots. And then after it’s done, we’re going to mark the site and then we’re going to work with our surveyor again to basically give us some easements since we have the four lots before we sell them, the surveyor is going to put an easement for basically the piping to go from the well to the new homes.
[3:01]
Emily: Excellent. That’s very cool. And so the big question of the day, how much is all this going to cost you?
[3:07]
Gary: Yes. I don’t know if that’s my least favorite question. But it’s hard to even get a well driller to be able to do this, there’s a lot of demand, a lot of development that’s going on. So a project like this, 700 foot well with a pump to be shared, be lucky if we can do this, we’re hopefully hoping that it’ll be under $50,000. And half of that is for the well, the other half would be for the pump, the tank, the storage tanks and some of the other stuff that’s required to get it all hooked up and connected.
[3:38]
Emily: Okay. Did you have a hard time finding your crew? How did you find them?
[3:43]
Gary: So, the way we found them is actually looking through the well registries, you’re able to see who’s got new permits. And we could see there was another developer that was here that had the permit here and basically talked to them, and they hadn’t dag the well yet. So it was pretty easy to just kind of do them all at the same time. And that’s how we’re able to find it. So Arizona well registry, you can see all the wells, you can see who’s put in for permits, and you can also get a list of local drillers that way as well.
[4:13]
Emily: Very cool. All right. Well, is there anything else about this project or wells in general that you want the viewers to know?
[4:22]
Gary: Yeah, so you don’t always know if you’re going to get water. This one, we felt pretty comfortable. So just, you know, check out, talk to some of the local drillers before if you’re going to do a project like this because there is no guarantee that they’re going to strike water. On this one, we’re making sure that we are digging support, we’re expecting the water, we think the water was around 350 feet. So, we’re gonna leave about a 400-foot margin or so just in case other people start developing and there’s more drawdown, we want to make sure that we have a good margin below the waterline and I guess that’s probably as far as for wells that’s probably all info for that. If you want to reach out when we start doing the septic tanks and the running the electric and then leveling and putting the home sites or even some of that setup, we’ll be doing that over the next few weeks.
[5:13]
Emily: Awesome. Well, stay tuned for more, everyone. This has been a great time, fun day today and we’ll catch you on the next one.
END
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