Do you have a website?
I currently send out a spreadsheet brochure every week with new rural lands and tiny or mobile house and van conversion options to choose from. I do virtual tours around the nature reserve or farm lands online, augmented by Google Earth and Streetview tours with video conference sessions. I shoot video tours and photo galleries of the available lands and houses. Most of the time its more like a coaching session, explaining how to get a visa, how to find reliable remote programming jobs, how to get a loan. Explaining why its very hard to make the transition without my professional help.
Some want to buy a turnkey house, land and infrastructure. This is possible but moving to a rural existence is much more involved than these customers think. A sales website would not convey this, this is why I prefer online tours and discussions.
morphle at ziggo dot nl to request my brochures or book a personal tour. I'm looking for cofounders and sales people (on commission).
I constantly search around the world, but most lands do not qualify because of local political rules. My best is a 100 acre(!) forest on the slope of a mountain. I have several mountain plots with a whitewater river flowing all year. Land plots with an entire forest or lake.
I tried to offer land in Kazachstan, Ukrain, Bangladesh, India, Argentina, Costa Rica, Australia and the Amazon rainforest but either foreigners are not allowed to own land or it is without Starlink or fiber backbones where not available or the country is involved in a war.
Above $50K (including the land, mobile house and infrastructure) I have a lot more offerings worldwide. Islands in Belize or very remote pacific islands, but you need a boat so its more than $50K. Desert locations, but you must have 4WD and only have two satelite or radio 100mbps connections and need multiple batteries, no fiber. Medical facilities only by plane or helicopter.
No electricity, has to truck in water, nearest paved road is 45 minutes, closest big box store (Costco) is in Phoenix, dirt roads flood when it rains and he has to camp out in the post office parking lot when it snows so he doesn’t get stuck trying to go work.
And he loves it…
So I have set up a few companies (a Coop, a non-profit and C-Corp, LTD, B.V.) in the Netherlands just for this purpose. You register yourself as a cofounder/owner of this company (free) and put $4500 in the company bank account. You now qualify for a working visa and can start roaming all over the EU.
I'm a little vague here, because I want to sell you all the advice and legal work to set all this up for $1000. You first get advice from all the other Americans I helped emigrate to Europe over the years. morphle at ziggo dot nl
Without my help it will cost you a few months, three visits to the Netherlands, setting up a company from scratch and hiring a notary, a lawyer and an expat fiscal tax lawyer for at least $19.000 all together.
Are you referring to DAFT? Isn't this only for NL though? Also don't you actually have to show that one of your companies is making money or they won't renew your visa after a year or so?
I must give the standard HN disclaimer though, I can't give legal advise in public, I can not give legal advise here without knowing your individual situation. Talk to you lawyer instead.
The whole point of the turnkey house+land+permits+visa+remote working+infrastructure package we make brochures, a community website and a Coop for is that you need legal support on top of the land buying, (off-grid) house building and electricity/fast internet, water recycling and remote working. We can't give legal advise in public, we can just warn you that is complicated.
A friend of mine is building entirely off-grid in Finland: https://medium.com/@upnorthandoffgrid
I’m not that interested in off-grid, but I am in a nice plot of land with nature, a decent home on it (as sustainable as possible) that I can use for a few months/year.
Let me know once you launch a site.
With so many interested people I think we should set up an online community. It could grow into the support network for us remote rural people worldwide. I'll add the myrad links to the biographies, blogs, vlogs, websites, articles and resources. I'll put up this website at http://ruralremote.org and a backup at http://fiberhood.org within 24 hours
The reason I offer rural land plus working visa plus a tiny house and infrastructure as a package is that it is very hard to arrange all this by oneself, especially for city people. It took me three years fulltime work, thousands of hours of video and many failures before I was successful. But its all worth it, off course! Waking up with deer drinking at your own river, walking for an hour through your own forest to reach the edge, getting lost on your own land, planting an acre of trees, planting and eating your own food, having meetings with customers from all around the world with a laptop under a palm tree, it really is as magical as I thought it would be.
But you still need at least a $1000 income from remote work and a visa, without it its even harder to make remote living work at all. Maybe we can help you find that remote work too, now that we have a large group of interested people.
More than 50% of people who attempt it wound up broke, ill or destitute, giving up after 10 year at moving to a rural off-grid existence.
Don’t be fooled by the low land prices, it is the easy part. Building and living permits and working visa are hard. Anyone can get an acre of land for $1000 in most of the US and Europe. Few can actually live there for more than a year (cold, drought, crime).
Cheap land is not the problem you have to solve. How to be warm in the winter, how to make a living when the nearest town is 2 hours driving, what to do when you are sick and 300km from a hospital, where you get the money to buy food or transport. How to find a partner or how to deal with loneliness.
I’l sell you an almost turnkey solution but you still need months of planning and preparation while your custom tiny house is being built (or existing house being renovated). I sell you my construction labour for $8K, $15K internet,electrical heating and water infrastructure, $21K house building materials, $6K legal fees and experience from a network of people who have made the transition.
As a Spaniard, I'm curious on how you're dealing with the amount of BS most municipialities throw at you, specially construction permits.
Also, why don't you make it as a community? I mean, it would be way easier to pool resources, make it cheaper for your customers and a more stable income for you, although they wouldn't be owners but renters.
Also, IDK in Portugal but getting on-grid electricity and internet (even fiber, if you're not too remote) shouldn't be a problem in Spain
I am making it a community site, with a HN type discussion forum and video blog hosting.
Fiber internet outside of a town is very much a problem in Spain! Electricity hookup (its called 'Solar' in Spanish) is almost impossible because you first need building and living permits and you simply will never ever get one. In Portugal its usually even harder. Laws are different in Arizona but still a big problem. You might need permission from the local tribe, or bridge a few hundred miles with microwave dishes as a backup to your Starlink. Having reliable electricity at night requires inverters and batteries that are not for sale yet, they must be custom built. And then you still need road access to your cheap rural land...
These are the reasons my company needs to help you find suitable land, get the permits and build your tiny house, because you can not do all that on your own, especially the electricity, water and internet you need for remote work.
First you need a community of rural land owners to fund the (minimal $25K) infrastructure build out . My company Fiberhood sets up a 300 Mbps Starlink Premium for Business ($9000 for the first year) on your land with 4G backup antennes and then builds a local fiber network to all the farms in the neighbourhood. After 12 months we hook up the fiber to the fiber backbone 100 km away, then you get 10 Gbps for around $99 per month on your rural land, fit for running a remote business.
As a Spaniard you point out the BS the municipalities (Ajuntamente) throw at you about permits. Don't forget the regional governments, the tax department, the electricity companies, etc. All over Europe this is a problem, but rural Spain and Portugal are especially difficult. This is why we only offer off-grid living in a few dozen locations this year. Only these locations where we have already managed to convince the local governments to give us permission, or place where we have found legal loopholes in the law. One example I can give is land in a nature reserve where you will never get a building permit for any house. But you are allowed to park a truck in that forest and live in it. In other places we get permits on our land because we build infrastructure to the local town as well. But you alone would never get that building or living permit, ever. You need to befriend the local technical architect and the mayor, buy them a couple of beers and have you children play soccer with them for a year before they will even listen to your building proposals that took you $5000 to draw up by another technical architect you hire. And it would still take a few years to get the 11 or so permits you need. We figure all this out for you, build the infrastucture and make a liveable house. You can off course do some of that work yourself (on top of your remote work you also do) but you still need our help in the first 2 years with permits and infrastructure.
Interesting. Is this an intentional thing i.e."We don't want people to live outside of towns so we're not going to issue any occupancy permits", or a bureaucratic incompetence/corruption thing?
For example, you can not build on rural land outside of town, not on farm land or on nature reserves. The government owns the water, you can't just digg a well. You can only get permission to build a tool shed in some areas if you own at least 5000m2. The police will evict you if you start building or living on your land, tipped off by the neighbours who don't like foreigners or competition from your farm. If you rent out your house to tourist, you'll need a permit and pay more taxes. And anything is slow, you'll run out of money much quicker than the government runs out of ways to delay you. Watch the 17 years of Dutch episodes (thru a dutch VPN) of "Ik Vertrek" for all the horror stories of people buying land or houses in Europe and losing all their money.
Maybe I would say that for ISPs there are plenty in rural Spain happy to lay fiber if you can assure them enough recurring revenue.
Even with the not so small ones like Adamo you have a chance of getting fiber laid.
My biggest problem (besides having stock photo pictures of national reserves as "brochure" (including a photo of an eagle - what does it have to do with anything?), and basically a completely lack of actual facts) is that I cannot figure out what is the business in all this for YOU?
The only thing I can imagine is that you are not really selling land (actually, these are not even your properties atm, are they?), but you are planning to buy some of these properties for your company using the money of punters, split them to smaller pieces, and then somehow lease them / sell them on. Which might be acceptable for some people I guess - but not exactly as "advertised"...
As you very rightly described, buying some land is not really the biggest hurdle - it is the administrative costs, the transportation, the time spent etc. And then there is the value of the know-how. Even if you know everything, it is a lot of extra work, and there is no way someone would do it for the price you mentioned (€50k fully inclusive?) ANYWHERE in Europe. I'm from the Eastern part of Europe, and even there, this would be a "steal" (ie. an unbelievably good price).
So I'd be very skeptical about this whole story, and remember, if something is too good to be true, it probably is. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though. Do you have anything _real_ to prove your story? Land+houses that you _have_ built and sold? Contacts to previous customers for references?... Any physical location people can visit and have a look around?