I differ from your average real estate agent , or even from your average land specialist in a number of ways.  I was blessed to be brought up looking at land on Sunday rides with my family or my parents and even holding a surveyor's rod for my Dad sometimes.  In sixth grade I helped him make a topographical map for a homesite for us on a 3.6 acre hillside parcel my family had bought.  I am very comfortable with all types of maps, topos, aerials, plats, etc. because of my upbringing and because it just comes to me naturally.  A Kaminer picnic sometimes meant that I was going to be holding a surveyor's rod for my Dad in some very unusual places, for instance, in the middle of a spillway in a river below a dam.

I was also blessed to be brought up where I could run around and just hang out in the woods from a very early age.  When I was three, my family moved to a location that was in a neighborhood on the outskirts of a town but that was also just a few hundred yards from a very old 80 acre lake.  It was fed by five or six streams and had one huge stream exiting it.  It was surrounded by woods that extended from north of Atlanta all the way to the north Georgia and Carolina mountains.  It took all afternoon to walk all the way around that lake and I had lots of happy hours there.  Not only were there fox and deer, there were also a few moonshine stills.  I became very comfortable with woods and wildlife, as critters like brim, bass, mud snakes, cottonmouths, catfish, copperheads, sliders, pileated woodpeckers, flying squirrels and snapping turtles were just a regular part of my life. 

Even though I lived around the country in various places, I longed to get back to the Carolina mountains and hills, the type of land where I live now.  In big cities you are around the physical things that man has built and around the attendant stress, crowds, traffic, noise, etc.  One difference out in the hills and mountains, is that you are around what the Creator has made, instead of what man has made.  That's what I prefer.  To use a sixties' word, it can be much more copacetic to be out in the hills and mountains.

I bring a lot of business experience and business education to the negotiating table with my clients.  I find it very helpful in understanding prices, markets, contracts, economic cycles (I personally adhere to the Austrian Economics Theory of the Business Cycle), investment opportunities and in contract negotiations, themselves.  In the late 70's, I was in technical sales (OEM) dealing with accounts with $300,000 and $500,000 potential, back when that really was a lot of money.  I called on design engineers at manufacturers that made bulldozers, truck cranes, class eight truck tractors, buses, etc., and also worked with manufacturing and field service people to make sure the product was going to work right.

After that, I did something I swore I would never do, I went back for yet another degree.  Undergraduate, I was a Business and Economics double-major at Vanderbilt (this was back before Vanderbilt became too cool to have a Business Administration major).  I have a Masters of International Management with the business work concentrated in Marketing from what was familiarly called T-Bird or Thunderbird, but was then officially called the American Graduate School of International Management.  The school was called Thunderbird because, "The graduate school was built on the site of Thunderbird Field, a historic airbase established to train American, Canadian, British and Chinese pilots during World War II."  The graduates are also known world wide as Thunderbirds or T-Birds.  (Now it is called Thunderbird School of Global Management.  You can see how it ranks if you are not familiar with T-Bird or T-Birds  at http://www.thunderbird.edu/about_thunderbird/rankings/index.htm.) 

The degree I swore I wouldn't go back for made me a Ph.D. economist.  The Ph.D. is in a very specialized field of economics that used to be called Land Economics but that is now called Agricultural Economics.

Does having taught agriculturally oriented business and econ courses at Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo make me a better land specialist?  Does heading up minors or Marketing majors or administering a business department or being a division head make me a better land specialist?  Does being incredibly steeped in price and demand and supply analysis for activities undertaken on land make me a better land specialist?  Does being sanctioned to teach International Business, Marketing or Economics?  How about hedging foreign currency risk or understanding the history of paper money or gold?  Would that help?  The question for you is, with whose aid do you wish to spend your hard earned dollars?

Whether it is my services, or the services of someone else that you engage, if you are going to buy, sell, develop or otherwise work with farms, investments, mountain land or large mountain properties such as estates or retreats, then work with an experienced land professional.  This is no knock, it's just a fact that the shiny high heels and wing tips of most agents have never seen the back of a residential lot, let alone hiked all over the likes of an 80 acre cove.  And most agents are not terribly proficient at reading or explaining topos or aerials or other maps or at figuring out where property lies from said maps.  Do they own a compass?  Do they always carry it?  Can they read it?  Do they know that the little rotating ring with numbers on their Silva Type 16 Guide Compass has something to do with those little numbers written on the property lines on plats from surveys?  We are not talking about easy to see, flat parcels surrounded by pavement like a parcel at the corner of 59th and Thunderbird in Glendale, Arizona.  Can they tell the difference between copperheads, rattlers and harmless snakes?  Are they comfortable with larger members of the wildlife community and with being far off the beaten path?

Many mountain brokers may have a four wheel drive truck or SUV.  I suggest you look at the sides of their vehicles.  If they are willing to scratch them up to get to the top of old farm, mining and logging roads, then maybe you have a land broker who can actually drive a four wheel drive in such situations.  Such an experienced land broker can show you much more of each parcel and many more total parcels in much less time than if you had to walk every single parcel.  And what's in the back of their four wheel drive?  Is there a first aid kit?  Are there tools to get you out of sticky situations, tools to cut through a tree that falls across the road while you are in the back of a parcel that is two miles from pavement?  Again the question for you is, with whose aid do you wish to spend your hundreds of thousands or millions of rapidly depreciating dollars?