Hunting Land - worth the hunt

For hunters, hunting land takes on great importance, and understandably so. It needs to be adequately stocked with animals for hunting, has to have enough food for the animals, while giving them enough land to live on comfortably, and with suitable habitat for them to thrive in. This can automatically put a lot of land as unsuitable for hunting.

So why are you looking for hunting land? Is it so you can start your own hunting club, or do you just want land for you and a few friends to hunt? Do you want to lease land, or are you wanting to purchase hunting land? Are you looking for a partner too so it's a joint venture where you both take equal risk? As you can see there are quite a few options available so you need to decide which path you are going to take first, before you start looking at hunting land.

If you are considering starting a hunting club, then presumably you will charge for annual memberships, and that money will help to pay for the land, or its upkeep. How many members do you think you can sign up? Are there a lot of people in your area? How much will they be willing to pay? how much will the upkeep cost? And the questions go on.

Next you need to decide on the location. Are you looking for land to hunt on in a particular area, or are you prepared to travel to where ever it is? How far would be too far? These are all questions that you need to at least have some idea about the answer before you commit to hunting land purchase or lease.

Ok, so is it better to lease or own hunting land? Obviously to some extent it depends whether you are financially able to purchase hunting land in the first place.

If you want your own land, where do you start? First of all you should check out other hunting clubs in the area you are interested in, as they may have land they are wanting to sell. If the land has already been used for hunting, you need to check carefully to see whether the stocks are still strong, or whether their deletion is causing the club to sell the land. If it is depleted, it will mean that you have to wait a few seasons before resuming hunting there, and that might not be what you want to do. On the other hand if you point this out to the seller, you may get a much better deal on the price.

The next consideration might be to take a look at land that is not currently designated as hunting land. If the owner isn't considering selling, he either may sell a portion of his land for hunting, or may let you lease some of his land for your hunting purposes. But first you need to get an idea of how the hunting would be on that land.

Check whether there has been any hunting in close by woods. Check the harvest from these areas, if there has been hunting there already, to see what the potential is likely to be for the land that interests you.

A lot of this research applies to leased hunting land too, and in addition, you need to check that the lease does not have any terms in it that are not appropriate for you and your plans. Read the small print carefully. In fact, whether you go for leased hunting land, or you purchase your own hunting land, make sure you do the background checks thoroughly, after making sure your business plan is sound too.