Unfenced - Find land for sale bordering public land
Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land
Unfenced is a platform that helps you find properties for sale that directly border public lands such as national forests, game lands, and wilderness areas. Unlike typical listings that rely on vague descriptions, Unfenced verifies boundaries against official maps, ensuring accuracy. With over 13,000 properties across 49 regions, you can explore an interactive map, see measured shared boundaries, and discover your next adventure-ready home. Whether you dream of hiking, hunting, or simply having nature at your doorstep, Unfenced makes it easy to find land where you can walk out your back door and keep going.
Walk out the back door. Keep going.
- snide
First, this is cool! Well done.
I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.
The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.
In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.
My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.
- kyleblarson
I owned a house on 60 acres in Washington State that was bordered on 2 sides by state land (WA DNR). It was generally great and the only time I closed my gate was actually these two weeks of every year for regular rifle deer season. I never had issues with hunters coming on my property (I did give some friends permission to bow hunt). My driveway was about a mile long and had to cross DNR land to reach my property, but I had an easement. The easements typically have a 35 year expiration and it would take extreme circumstances for the state not to renew an existing easement. Complete and total privacy is really nice, but it's certainly a lot of effort and money to maintain a remote property of that size with a large house. I had to travel to SF a lot for work and that was certainly not ideal: 2.5 hour drive minimum to a tiny airport that only served Seattle, then on to SF.
- windowshopping
This is super unreliable. I clicked through a few of the listings and none of them were what this site seemed to think they were. In one case it said a unit had 50 acres of land, and when I clicked through it was a two-bedroom condo with no land. Another said it had 1400 acres of land and when I clicked through it was 0.14.
- hasbot
This is interesting though not really for me. I know that without trails, I won't be walking past the end of my property onto other property. I've probably spent a year of my life building trails on my own property.
When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.
- ggreer
It seems to not find quite a few properties that border public land. For example, if I scroll around Zillow to find stuff that borders the Gifford Pinchot national forest, I can find properties like this one.[1] But I don't see anything matching it on the Unfenced map.
I bought 20 acres bordering the national forest a couple years ago. The seller made sure I had some idea of what I was getting into. Due to the isolation and terrain, everything is more difficult. It's been a lot of work to build a road, level an area to build on, construct a shed, and set up off-grid solar power. But it's also very rewarding. The views are spectacular, and at night you can see the milky way. There's still a lot more work to do before it's worthy of being called a vacation spot, but I'm very happy with my decision.
1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Snag-Mountain-Rd-110-Wash...
- Anon1096
If you have public land do you just have people walking over the property boundary onto your parcel all the time? Especially in the more populous states like NJ some of them I'd expect that to be pretty common, interesting idea as a thing that people search out specifically for though.
Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms
> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.
> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service
plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.
- noman-land
It's blowing mind a bit that you made this and released it because I was on the verge of doing it myself. Very nice work.
Really curious about your data sources. Where are you getting all this stuff?
- bko
This is cool, but isn't owning property bordering public land undesirable?
Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.
Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?