As a landowner, you should know what is on your property and what is around your property. It is important to understand your property lines and resources on your land. Additionally, it is important to know what other landowners around you have.
This helps you build an understanding on how your property can provide you with potential passive income! Many landowners can inherit property and never have a chance to visit the land but LandGate makes viewing the parcel easy.
Getting to Know Your Real Estate
Understanding what is on or near one's property can be challenging. This is especially true if the landowner has never visited the land. LandGate provides landowners with a map view of their property with parcel boundaries and data about the land’s resources. Through a property report, landowners can learn more about their land’s potential value for natural and renewable resources. The property report will provide an overview of a landowner's agricultural value. It will be broken down into categories such as cropland, developed land, pastureland, woodland, water, and more.
The cropland potential will show land usage by acre and the estimated value for crops.
The developed land shows the acreage of open space, low, medium and high intensity and the value for each.
The pastureland identifies what type of pasture is available, the acreage and the value.
The woodland shows the potential wetlands and forest available for acreage and value.
Water features and water wells will also be identified if they are located on the property.
Learning about the land's capabilities on a general and granular level can help landowners make decisions about their land. Landowners can learn about the soil types on their land. This knowledge, combined with an understanding of agricultural breakdown, can help them identify potential benefits of agricultural income or carbon offset.
Renewable Energy Land Potential
Another option that landowners can have is the use of renewable energy projects for passive income that requires very minimal time and maintenance. Major factors to consider when looking into renewable energy potential include:
Electrical Infrastructure
Buildable Acreage
State or County Incentives
Electrical Infrastructure
Different types of electrical infrastructure, if found within 2 miles of the property, increase the value for renewable energy projects dramatically. Energy developers are very interested in properties that have electrical infrastructure nearby as it is one less thing to be developed.
Substations: Substations take electricity from a generating station and modify its voltage level to meet the needs of a consumer. They can also carry out other important tasks related to the transmission of electricity. This conversion process often involves multiple substations, each changing the voltage to a different level. Landowners with a substation nearby their property will notice that their value is significantly higher.
Transmission/Distribution Lines: The ability to use high-voltage electric lines is essential for the growth of large-scale solar energy initiatives, since these lines are critical for enabling the transmission of electricity from the solar energy source to the consumer. High-voltage lines allow for the electricity to travel over longer distances without excessive losses of power, and are also capable of carrying larger amounts of electricity than lower voltage lines.
The use of high-voltage electric lines can reduce the amount of land required for the installation of solar energy systems, as fewer lines are needed to transmit the same amount of electricity. By utilizing high-voltage electric lines, solar energy initiatives can become more efficient and cost-effective, allowing for their successful implementation on a larger scale.
Buildable Acreage
LandGate’s property report is able to explain how much acreage is buildable for potential solar or wind energy projects. For landowners who inherit land that they have never visited before, this can be a quick and easy way to identify acreage potential. The acreage details will explain how many total buildable acres there are compared to the gross parcel acreage. Splitting up the acreage details between wetland, topography percentages, waterways, existing electrical infrastructure, and more.
State or County Incentives
Landowners that are interested in passive income from renewable energy projects should also do some research about potential state or county incentives available surrounding solar and wind development. For example, AgriSolar Clearinghouse has an interactive map of the United States that shows information about funding, incentives, tax breaks and available programs in different states for solar energy.
LandGate’s property report makes it easy for landowners to educate themselves about their land in ways they might have before. Expanding your knowledge about land’s potential will benefit you and your property.
