How buying Arizona land from out of state works.

Almost every question we get from someone in Ohio or Washington or New Jersey is a version of the same one: can I actually do this from here, or am I going to get taken?

You can do it from there. Rural land has been sold to out-of-state buyers for as long as there has been rural land, and the mechanics are well worn. But the distance is not free either — it removes the one check most people rely on without noticing, which is standing on the thing before they pay for it.

So the honest version is this: buying remotely is normal, and it works, provided you replace the walk-around with actual verification instead of just hoping. Here is what each step looks like.

Looking at a parcel you cannot stand on

Photos are the least useful thing in the listing. Anyone can point a camera at the good half of a lot.

What to look at instead

• A walkthrough video that runs from the road onto the parcel and turns in a full circle. If a seller will not produce one, that is information too.
• The county mapping site. Every Arizona county publishes parcel boundaries online, free, searchable by parcel number. It will show you the shape of the lot and what surrounds it.
• Satellite and street-level imagery from any of the usual mapping services. Check the date on the imagery — desert changes slowly, but roads and neighbours do not.
• The plat map, which shows lot lines, dimensions and easements the photos never will. Our guide on how to read a plat map covers what to look for.

Send someone, even if it is not you

If you can get there, go — nothing replaces it, and a weekend trip is cheap next to a bad purchase. If you cannot, someone local can walk it for you. A land surveyor, a local inspector, a real estate agent working that county, or in a lot of rural areas simply somebody who lives nearby and will take an hour for a reasonable fee.

Doing the checks — which are remote anyway

Here is the part that surprises people. Almost none of the real due diligence on a parcel happens in person. It happens on the phone and on county websites, and it works exactly the same from Phoenix or from Pennsylvania.

Everything below starts with the parcel number. If you do not have it, our guide on finding an Arizona APN shows you how to get it.

• Who owns it — the county assessor or recorder shows the current owner of record. Confirm the person selling it to you is that person before anything else.
• What is owed on it — the county treasurer publishes the annual property tax and anything currently unpaid, by parcel, free.
• What you can do with it — the county planning or development department will tell you the zoning and what it allows. Ask specifically about whatever you are actually planning to do.
• Whether it floods — flood zone information is published nationally and by county, and it is worth two minutes.
• What services would cost — the utility that serves the area will give you a line-extension estimate over the phone. Our guide on water, power and roads covers the rest.
• Whether the access is real — the difference between a road you can drive on and a road you have a recorded right to drive on, which is the one that costs people money.

Our guide on what to check before you buy goes through all of it in order. The point here is that not one of those calls cares where you are calling from.

Checking out the seller

This matters more when you are remote, because you are also not going to be standing in anybody's office.

Look up the current owner of record with the county and confirm it matches whoever is selling. Ask how they came to own it. Ask for the parcel number up front — a seller who will not give you the parcel number is a seller who does not want you checking, and there is no innocent version of that.

We wrote a whole guide on this: how to check out a land seller before you send money. It is free to do and it is the highest-value twenty minutes in the whole process.

Signing from another state

The part people expect to be hard, and it is usually the easiest.

A title or escrow company handles the closing and the paperwork. Ask them, early, one question: what do you need from an out-of-state buyer, and how do you want it back? They arrange this constantly. They will tell you which documents have to be signed, how they need each one witnessed or executed, and whether the simplest route is a notary who comes to you, an appointment somewhere near you, or a courier both ways.

Ask at the start rather than the end. The only version of this that goes badly is the one where a document arrives on a Friday and nobody told you in advance what to do with it.

Paying, and the one scam that keeps working

Money goes to the escrow or title company. Not to a seller's personal account, not to an individual, not by any method that cannot be traced or reversed.

And then the part we would put in bold on a billboard if we could:

Wire fraud in real estate is not exotic and it is not rare. It works by watching an email thread and sending the buyer a message that looks exactly like the real one, from an address that is off by a character, with different account numbers. Money sent that way is generally gone. The two-minute phone call is the entire defence, and everyone in the industry expects you to make it — nobody at a title company is going to be offended that you called to check.

Everything else about paying remotely is ordinary. Cash purchases usually close quickly. If the seller is carrying the financing, you are also signing a note and the paperwork that secures it, and the same rule applies: ask the closing company what they need and when.

Confirming the deed actually recorded

This is the step people skip, and it is the one we would keep if we had to throw the rest of this page away.

After a closing, the deed is recorded with the county recorder in the county where the parcel sits. That recorded document is the public statement that you own it. Somebody telling you it was recorded is not the same thing as it being recorded.

How to check it yourself

1. Go to the county recorder's site for the county the parcel is in. Most Arizona counties have a public document search online.
2. Search by your name, by the seller's name, or by the recording number the closing gave you.
3. Open the document and read it. Check your name is spelled correctly. Check the parcel description matches what you bought. Check the date.
4. Save a copy. Keep it with the closing paperwork somewhere you will find it in ten years.

If it is not there a couple of weeks after closing, call the company that handled the closing and ask where it is. Recording can lag by a few days and that is normal; lagging by two months is not.

Do the same thing on the tax bill. Property tax bills follow the county's records, so the first bill in your name is a second confirmation that the county knows the land is yours. If the bill keeps going to the previous owner, something did not finish, and you want to know that in month two rather than year three.

The short version

1. Get the parcel number before anything else.
2. Confirm the seller is the owner of record, with the county.
3. Look at the plat, the county map and a walkthrough video — and send somebody local if you cannot go yourself.
4. Call the county about zoning, the treasurer about what is owed, and the utility about what service would cost.
5. Confirm the access is recorded, not just driven on.
6. Ask the closing company early what they need from an out-of-state buyer.
7. Verify wire instructions by phone, on a number you looked up yourself.
8. Two weeks later, find your own deed in the county records and read it.

None of that requires an Arizona address. All of it requires you to actually do it, which is the part distance makes easy to skip.

Why we go on about this

We are Tyson and Jennifer, a family company working with vacant rural parcels across Arizona. A good share of the people we expect to sell to will never have set foot in the state, so the parts of this that are inconvenient — the access, the utilities, what a parcel does not have — are the parts we would rather put in front of a buyer early than have them discover after closing. A buyer who feels ambushed is a problem we would rather not create in the first place.

If you are working through a specific parcel and want a second opinion on what to check, write to us. We will tell you what we would look at, including when the answer is that we would walk away from it.