Monday, September 22, 2008

Mineral Rights

The next thing to check into: Mineral Rights and Mining Leases

Now, the realtors might tell you that the Mineral Rights in most of Nevada is owned by large corporations... and that's true.

However, some of the land mentioned not only has the Mineral Rights owned by a mining company, but it's also under a Mineral Lease.
That means the large corporation has Leased the Right to Mine to a smaller company for mining. That also usually means that at some point, they will.

There have already been two cases in Desert Valley (Jungo Road area) this year where the mining company has come in and bulldozed entire mini-ranches in order to get to the minerals underneath.

They can legally do that... and they don't have to compensate the landowners for anything... at all.

So... how to avoid all that, and still get cheap land?

Get land that's zoned in such a way that mining companies would have to jump through hoops in order to do any mining... and would have to do it on small scale if they did get permission.

In Humboldt County, that means it needs to be zoned at least AG-20: Agricultural lots of 20-39 acres.

In Pershing County, it means the zoning would have to be at least LDR: Low Density Rural.

I haven't researched Lander, Eureka, or Elko Counties yet, because that's farther from Reno than we wanted to move.

For all that cheap property in Desert Valley... you can go to your property, you can camp on it, play paintball on it, or other things like that... so long as you're not going to try to build anything that you don't mind being bulldozed.

You can usually get this information from the County Assessor's Office.

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