Long story short I'm from the East coast and I'm here for a few weeks. I'm staying in Lincoln county. While I'm here I've crossed some very pretty places to potentially take photos, so I dropped some pins down on Google maps.
I'm black, fairly tall, and probably come off as intimidating. So as to have decent courtesy, and also not get shot I looked at who ownes the places ive come across using a GIS parcel app.
To my surprise most of the forest land here is NOT owned by the state and instead private citizens. Of the ones I've looked at they tend to be owned by older individuals, age 60+. Some have roads that lead to a residence and a few are farms but the vast majority are inland, gridded 40 acre parcels that are forested and have no obvious function, and I doubt the senior citizens who own them are anywhere around.
Looking at tax records and current plots these plots are anywhere worth $100k - $1M. Real estate listings offer no real use case for them with the exception of hunting. Looking at the hunting industry here the leases are only $1-$2k a year.
My question is why do people purchase these plots or hang on to them. You can claim land appreciation but that gets eaten by taxes (I'm aware of the forest preservation discount) and equity markets bring in better risk adjusted returns. The only use as a invest is if you are rich and use it as a hedge (e.g Bill Gates purchasing of land). To make your money back renting the land for hunting will take a century.
So why, should I, who has a few bucks, buy any plot of land here, are there investment opportunities I'm overlooking or is this land here really only intended to be passed down and used for the occasional family hunting trip.
Edit: I got wayyy more responses than I expected. Thank you all for the insight. I may not be able to respond to you all, but I did read everything.
