SHRIKE - The Assassin Bird

Looking for a little piece of "dirt" to call a landing-pad should be fun, right? Here around Tucson, like most of the fringes of southwest's cities, desert land that was marginally developed by punching-in a half-assed road, sticking a few electric poles in the sand and then sold on speculative optimism is now in greedy bank‘s hands. The scheme of interplay between valuation and liquidity blew up in their deserving faces and is now for sale at hugely reduced prices; In other words, back to "almost" normal.

We spent the day trying to locate three of these bank repo properties with our reward being many miles of rig-rattling, teeth chattering, dusty dirt roads traversed and never actually finding any of these plots. Even with the aid of our Garmin GPS, they were just too elusively listed to locate.

One 10 acre piece we did locate the day before seemed perfect. A mile off the blacktop with a good dirt road to an isolated, no neighbor, scrub and cactus, end of the electric line dusty paradise. Property found, problems begin. Like the nice lady I spoke with at the electric company, while trying to find out how to have the electric connected, said, “It’s a zoo out there, no one is going to take care of, or help you, except yourself. These Realtors will tell you anything to get into your pocket.”

Our patience drained and reality heightened, I think we’ve decided that putting another piece of property in our portfolio would be counter productive to our personal concept of "fun." 

So for now we concentrate on finding those Bureau of Land Management out-of-the-way places that requires no paperwork, realtor/banker dealings or long term commitments.

Bankers Realtors Parakeet