Then you will pay dearly for building supplies, encounter dire conflict with the county's building inspector and likely purchase property that is suboptimal for construction.

You can surmount all of these issues with expertise and experience but as an avid follower of all things real estate, and as someone who has owned Earthship books and Five Acres and Independence for 15 years, allow me to point out that all the too-good-to-be-true stuff out there is.

A fun game I like to play is "what's wrong with this property?" Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's buried, but when guys with 40 hours' worth of education are laying traps for you, it shouldn't take 40 hours' worth of learnin' to avoid them.

That said, your idea isn't impossible or even undesirable. It's just trickier than it looks. We see a world full of successful businesses because the unsuccessful ones are gone. We see a world full of successful cabins because the unsuccessful ones never got off the ground.

I wanted a place up in Bellingham once. Found 20 acres on the side of a hill with a waterfall. Got out and walked it - found a kitchen under a mudslide. the waterfall used to be a reservoir, just like outlined in Cadillac Desert. Place had been scraped for timber and then swapped out, so that you could never develop it. They still wanted $350k. I probably have five or six of those places on my watchlist at any given time.

It can be done. It just needs to be done with care.