Thanks, Mortimer! (I always liked you better than Howdy.)

I'm paying $5K per acre for the property.That may sound like a lot
(pardon the pun) to people from other parts of the country, but
undeveloped land around here is cheap. Land on the other side of the
major city I'm near (about 55 miles due north goes for $50K PER ACRE
and up. That is likely to happen here over the next 20 years (when I'll
be 87 and needing to finance the nursing home).

My late husband and I bought two acres contiguous with this land (also
totally undeveloped wild brush country) in 1999 for $1,900 per acre
from a lovely honest, salt-of-the-earth gentleman who owned all 700
acres. He and my H died within the following year.

I contacted the nephew a couple of years later, around 2002 and asked
about buying more of the land and I offered $1,900. I had to write to
him twice before I got a reply, and then it wasn't from him but a
brother-in-law. He gave me the "Heh, heh, Little Lady" routine-- "I
understand you've been writin' some letters (heh, heh), well, isn't
that nice?" He said that since the older gentleman had died the
property went to several family members and they hadn't decided how to
dispose of it. I called him a couple more times over the next year or
two and he kept brushing me off.

Finally I heard by the grapevine (mustang grapes, dontcha know) that "a
developer" had bought the property. The blood ran cold in my veins.
That was in March 2006.

When I first contacted the current seller (hereinafter referred to as D
for developer), he also brushed me off and told me he'd get back to me
when they were ready to do something with that end of the 700 acres. D
implied it would be years down the road. Then (IMHO) he started to see
that I was serious and that I could put my hands on the cash. That was
about a month ago. Now all of a sudden, he's got to have my answer NOW?
I don't think so. What he has done is carved out a long skinny triangle
that runs along my fence line. The point of the triangle is at the
road, and then it widens out as you get away from the road. Since my
house is about 1/4 mile off the road, the shape of the parcel is fine
with me. There is no highway frontage in this parcel because I own the
two acres next to it and already have road frontage. (He's selling the
roadfront lots for $38,000 per acre to anyone dumb enough to pay that
right now-- probably people from Out of Town.)

I don't honestly know what land is going for down the road-- and houses
are popping up like mushrooms around here because the land IS so cheap
and we're about 25 miles of easy driving from a major city. I agreed to
pay $5K per acre, and I don't mind. I think it's on the high side of
fair but not outside the fair zone. I never had a real problem with the
price, and I believe, thanks or no-thanks to D's like him, the property
values are going to go sky-high in the near future.

This will increase my total holdings to 23 acres, and of course it will
be right next to his chichi-poopoo subdivision, and that will be a good
thing.

Thanks for sticking with me, Mort.