Arizona Land Buying Questions Video #1

In this video, Felicia answers a bunch of your Arizona land buying questions! See what questions get answered in video #1!

From the video:

Hi there I’m Felicia, co-founder and co-owner at Compass Land USA.

Today we are going to get a bunch of your Arizona land buying questions answered!

So one of our team members pointed out to me that there are a lot of really great questions being left in the comments of our videos, and it would be a great idea for me to do a Q&A video answering the questions, she’s clearly smarter with this stuff than I am, so I’m taking her advice and we’re going to do just that.

If you have questions for us about one of our videos, make sure you leave a comment! I want to keep this Q&A series going.

Q1: Artifact Laws on Private Property in Arizona

Ok so first up. A question from Ryan “Artifact laws on private property in Arizona?”

Alright, Ryan, I will admit this is something I knew nothing about. I had to do a lot of digging and researching to get an answer here.  And to be honest with you, I’m not really satisfied with what I’ve found.

So it seems like you are able to keep or sell artifacts found on your private property. Anything found on state or federal lands, there are lots of restrictions against collecting and removing artifacts.

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (1979) forbids any artifacts from being disturbed or removed. If you’re on state or federal land and you think you’ve found something, you need to contact the public agency that owns the land and let them know of the artifact’s location.

If you think you’ve found burials or human remains on your Arizona property, you need to contact the Arizona State Museum Burial Coordinator for remains to be transferred. Arizona’s State Historic Preservation Office will help private landowners identify, evaluate, and protect any artifacts. They will also:

• give technical assistance to owners of historic properties
• identify and evaluate historic structures and sites
• give assistance to property owners seeking tax credits and incentives

If you want to learn more about that, you can contact the State Historic Preservation Office here: https://azstateparks.com/shpo/.

So what I’ve gotten from all this is on your own private land, artifact collection seems to be ok unless it contains burial grounds or remains. Again, I’m not totally confident with this information, so if you’re really keen on digging around on your property, Ryan, I would contact the Historic Preservation Office and see what they say.

Q2: Preliminary Title Report Required in Arizona

Ok next question, Desert Denizen left this comment: “Does Arizona require a Preliminary Title Report of equivalent? A property disclosure report, which states known or should be known conditions that could potentially affect the use of the property? This would be items or conditions not readily apparent. I’m from California where nobody complains about too little paperwork :).”

Don’t we know that about California. Ok, so in Arizona, they have something called a Vacant Land/Lot Seller’s Property Disclosure statement (referred to as SPDS).

Whenever buying or selling land through a realtor in Arizona, you need to use this document. It’s not required outside of that. The SPDS requires you as the seller to disclose any material facts about the property, regardless of whether or not you were asked for it.

You’re supposed to complete it as fully and truthfully as possible. It has 9 main sections:

• Ownership and Property
• Access
• Use
• Utilities
• Water
• Sewer/Waste Water Treatment
• Environmental Information
• Miscellaneous
• Additional Explanations

And we can see an example of the SPDS here: https://www.aaronline.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/a113.pdf

Looking through it you can see a lot of this information is of good value to the buyer. Zoning, parcel number, is any of the land leased, CCRs, HOAs or POAs, known title issues, legal access, current property use, utility info.

These areas aren’t as important as they would be with houses, but it’s there nonetheless. Often this will be left blank, a lot of land sellers won’t have that info or be able to verify it. So that’s the SPDS. If you’re not buying land through a realtor, don’t worry because you can still get this information directly from the land seller. They should have all of this for you.

For example, on our listings at Compass Land USA, let’s pull up an Arizona one here, we try to be as transparent as possible and include a lot of that SPDS info in our listings. 

You can see we make sure there are no title issues with properties we sell, parcel number, zoning, legal description, HOA s, utility info, access, it’s all in there for you. We also include county phone numbers so you can ask them any questions or verify directly if wanted.

There’s another important document to mention here, it’s called an Affidavit of Property Value. This is required for every transaction, regardless of if you go through a realtor or not. This document verifies the monetary exchange of the property, sale date, and other info.

It’s required by the Arizona Department of Revenue, we can see the current form on their website here: https://azdor.gov/forms/property-tax-forms/affidavit-property-value.

Ok so Desert Denizen, I hope that answers your question. Thankfully there isn’t too much paperwork required for land transactions here in Arizona.

Q3: Distance to Amenities from Arizona Land

Next comment, Onlyreal Tink said: “Another thing I suggest finding out is how far to necessary amenities like groceries, gasoline, etc. Too many people are buying land near little towns that are 1 road towns. They do not have grocery stores. And you’ll need to travel 18 to 20 miles to get there. Even then, like right now Walmart 14 miles from me is sold out of everything. I suggest people go look at these lands before purchasing. Also Mesquite trees aren’t ‘shade’ trees but many sellers of these properties are listing them as such.”

Ok! That was a mouthful.  So Tink, that is some great advice. For our property tour videos, you’ll notice that we do a presentation of sorts, and share some information about the area.

Typically in those images, you’ll get information on the closest city or town, and what amenities and resources they can offer you. This is a great resource for you to use to understand what’s in the area nearby the property for sale. We share this on each website listing as well, so we still have this listing open, we’ll use it as an example.

So at the top of the listing, you have all these beautiful property pictures. If you keep scrolling past the property pictures, you’ll be able to access those images here as well. For this property, it’s in Rimrock, so we have a bunch of information about Rimrock, what’s nearby: hunting, parks, groceries, banks, etc.

We also give information on the next closest city, Cottonwood. So that would be your backup if something in Rimrock was sold out.  Another resource you could use is the map. So if you’re wondering where this property is, and what towns are nearby, scroll down on the listing to the map.

Click on “View larger map”. This will open it up in Google Maps, and then you can manipulate it a bit more and see where it’s at. A cool trick for Google Maps is that you can measure the distance to towns and cities, etc. You can also search for nearby amenities.

If you click Nearby, you can type in “grocery stores” and it’ll give you a bunch of options. If you zoom out you’ll see options in nearby towns and cities as well, including Cottonwood, Sedona, Prescott, and Prescott Valley. You can scroll through the pages of results for different options.

Ok! So I hope you guys enjoyed that Arizona Q&A session number 1! I thought that was kind of fun and hopefully, Ryan, Desert Denizen, and Tink catch this video to see their questions get answered.

Alright if you have any questions, as always leave a comment, which means something more now that we have these Q&A series going.

Give us a like and click that subscribe button so that you’re the first to know when a new property tour or land blog video comes out! Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll talk to you soon.🙂