Buying land for wildlife and conservation

vsl4xx

I would like to buy a plot of land for wildlife conservation.  There seems to be very little for sale - are there specialist sites I should be looking for?

twopenny

Where are you looking?

They will be advertised on the sites where the company deals more with farming and land sales so you need to find out which those are and look directly at their websites.

I live on Exmoor and the surrounding countryside often has plots of wild woodland for sale.

Remember though that it need maintenance and can't just be left or one type of vegetation grows faster than others so reducing the amount of wildlife to just those that thrive on that limited plant growth. You need variety.

Also any trees that may be a danger to paths or roads need to be watched for and felled/

Davesnave

There are no specialist sites, just the usual property portals, but just like you might see a house with a big garden privately advertised in 'The Garden,' so you might see land for conservation sold privately in a natural history type of magazine, but these ads will be relatively rare.

Rightmove has filters for land, area and price. Setting those sensibly gave me 3 pages in my county, most of which were building plots and similar. The ability to build pushes up the price, but you haven't given us a price range to work with, so I went up to £100k.

This came up: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-89119447.html

It looks ideal for anyone only wanting a small piece of wild land, but because it has everything, including running water and it's in one of the more expensive areas of the county, it won't go for anything like the guide price. I'd guess at more like £30 - 35k, but if someone wealthy wants it.....who knows?

For a larger acreage, there's : https://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-for-sale/property-89600032.html

This works out at under £20k an acre, assuming it goes for a bit more than the guide price; pretty much the baseline price in this county unless the site has off-putting features like being very steep.

We don't know where you are looking. Somewhere like West Wales is going to be cheaper and if you're in the Home Counties the sky's the limit. There is no point having land a long way from where you live.

Apodemus

Small plots of land are highly sought-after, even if there is no prospect of planning permission.  It might be worth keeping an eye on property auction sites, as from time to time you see former water tanks, small supply reservoirs, railway sidings etc come up, which are of no commercial value but could make interesting "re-wilding" opportunities albeit on a very small scale.