The Scoop
The Press Room
Land is the Better Investment
In years past, the land around Pontotoc, Mississippi, northwest Alabama, south Tennessee, and Arkansas primarily was farm land. As Savely explains, “Back in the early 1980s, when the price of soybeans skyrocketed, we saw a lot of investors looking for farm lands suited for growing soybeans. However, over the last 25 years, we’ve seen more of this cropland being converted to timber lands and forest-recreation lands, and we don’t see that trend changing in the foreseeable future.”
One factor that is playing a critical role in the increase of interest by investors is the tech boom and bust of a few years ago. Investors who put their money in technology and technology stocks had no control over what happened to those dollars. The market went up and down, depending on the mood of the people in the United States and overseas. Many investors believed that we were living in a technology age and that any money invested in technology had to grow. Therefore, the prices of technology stocks were driven through the roof. Finally investors realized that technology stocks often amounted to a bet on a pie in the sky and that there was no real value to many of the companies that had stocks going through the roof. These companies had no hard assets, no cash and no pipeline of products to drive up the costs (value) of those stocks. The only motivating factor for many of these stocks was greed. People were investing in technology stocks betting on the idea that more people would invest in technology stocks, making the stocks worth more. When the technology sector of the stock market dropped so dramatically that thousands of investors lost large sums of money, more individuals, companies and corporations began buying land.
“An investor who has put his money into land can walk out of the house and go look at what he owns,” Savely says. “He can see the timber, the wildlife, the dirt, the water, the houses and the buildings that he owns. Regardless of what happens in the stock market, at the end of the day, he’ll own just as much land as he has at the beginning of the day.”
Savely also is developing areas for sub-developments for the investor who can’t purchase a 150 or 200 acres, but still is searching for a piece of property where he can have a front yard, a backyard, and perhaps a place to raise a flower and/or a vegetable garden or possibly put up a dog run. These investors don’t want to be able to throw dishwater out of their kitchen windows and splash it against their neighbors’ houses. Instead, these investors do want a little more room than a townhouse or a garden home would offer. Savely remarks, “We have a development company that’s putting in two new sub-developments in our region right now. One of our mid-income subdivisions is a 45-acre lot, right outside the city limits that has 36 lots. Another, more-upscale subdivision has plenty of wooded property on it, with a minimum of 2 acres per lot on the 140-acre tract.”
For more information on Mossy Oak Properties’ Pontotoc Ridge Realty, contact Jack Savely by phone at 662-489-2848 or by e-mail at jsavely@mossyoakproperties.com. To view multiple Mossy Oak Properties offices, visit the website at www.mossyoakproperties.com.
Tomorrow: Why Mossy Oak?
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