one MEEN Ag said:
one safe place said:
Over the years, I had several clients who had sand pits on their property. All were on property they acquired for that purpose. They made a tons, and I mean tons, of money selling topsoil, sand, mix, and clay. They always cored the properties prior to purchase.
Followed a guy on twitter who bought some property up in montgomery county. Had a big hill on it with trees over the property. Over the course of a few years he:
Sold the trees for wood (didn't make much money here)
Started dig out the big hill and sold the dirt and sand
Kept digging when he flat land a made a big pit
Leveled out the property, sold it to developers
Developers put houses and they had a built in low level lake with detention capacity already.
Yeah, dude made some money.
Reminds me of a client and friend of mine. He was at one of his gates one day and a car pulls up, guy and gal get out and ask if he knows where the "such and such" place was (called it by name). And he said he sure did. The car had out of state tags on it. Across the farm to market road was property owned by a local and there was a pumping unit on it. The guy or gal asked if that was on the "such and such" place and my friend said no. He told them to follow him and he would show them where the property was.
He drives to it, everyone gets out, no oil wells to be seen. Turns out they had just inherited the land and were hoping to hit a home run via oil and gas production. One of them said they were probably going to just sell it as they had no desire to own acreage producing no income when it was so far from their home. They got to talking about it and he said he would make them an offer in a week or two. They got all excited, no sales commission, just about a done deal.
He knew there was some mineral leasing going on in the area, in fact he had property adjoining this 1,100 acres. He cruised the property for timber, had someone else in the timber business do the same thing. Got in touch with the landman who he had dealt with on his tract. Mind you this was in the 80s so prices were not as insane as they are now. He made them an offer, they accepted, he made a timber deal (on the same day he closed on the purchase) and a few weeks later did a more than decent oil and gas lease. Though he had to pay tax on the timber sale and the oil and gas lease, he wound up with about a $75 an acre cost in the tract. And they leased it again a few years later, after the first one expired, and eventually drilled and made a well or two. Nothing major but still a great deal.
