Buying land in Cache County

Logan sits in the middle, and around it are Smithfield, Hyde Park, North Logan, Providence, River Heights, Millville, Nibley, Hyrum, Wellsville, Mendon, Paradise, Richmond, Lewiston, and more. Each is its own municipality with its own zoning, its own utilities, and its own answers.

Between and around them is unincorporated county. In practice a lot of the acreage inventory in the valley sits in that in-between ground, which means county permitting and no city services at the road.

The valley is irrigated ground and has been for a long time, and there are numerous irrigation companies operating across it rather than one dominant system. Which company serves a parcel, how many shares go with it, and whether those shares are current are all parcel-specific questions.

Several of the towns also run secondary water systems, separate from culinary. Whether a given lot is connected, or merely could be connected, is a real cost difference and worth pinning down.

The valley floor is farm ground and has been. The benches on both sides are where a lot of the newer building has gone, and the west side under the Wellsville Mountains stays more open and more acreage-oriented. The north end, up toward Richmond and Lewiston, is the most agricultural part of the valley.

Growth in the valley has concentrated in the smaller towns rather than in Logan itself, so a lot of the buildable inventory is in places people outside the valley have not heard of. That is usually good news on price and bad news on assumptions, because every one of those towns has its own rules.