Hey, how's it going? It's Seth here.
I wanted to show you something that I thought might be kind of useful.
Sometimes as a land investor I hear potential buyers or other land investors,
or really anybody talk about government or state-owned land as if it's like
an amazing thing to have right next door to your property, whether it's adjoining your property
or across the street from your property, or even down the road from your property.
In a lot of ways, people perceive this as being a big asset or just being advantageous.
And I will say there is some validity to the idea,
simply because if you've got government land right in your backyard
or right next door, or anywhere near your property,
to some extent that is going to prevent other development,
say, if you don't want a Walmart to get built right next door,
or if you don't want to have neighbors nearby,
knowing where that government owned land is, can be useful.
So I wanted to show you this map you can use online from the us geological survey.
I'm going to include a link to this map beneath this video, if you ever want to check it out.
And really the whole purpose of this map is just to point out
where all the protected areas are throughout the entire United States.
And protected areas can mean a lot of different things.
It could be a forest service, national park service
bureau of land management.
There's lots of different like governmental entities that falls under,
but even so just knowing where these areas are
and what type of protection they have can be a useful thing.
And this map will show you for free.
So really to start using it, it's not quite as simple as just plugging in a physical address,
but you have to know a general location.
For example, if you know what township or city or county this is in, that would be one way to start.
For example, let's say I own a property in Northern Michigan,
and I know that it's somewhere near the Manistee National Forest.
What I could do is type in maybe the city where it is, or the city that is nearby
And keep in mind, I need to already kind of know where this thing is.
I need to be pretty educated about that because if I don't know my property's exact location,
then this whole exercise is pointless. I kind of have to understand what property I'm looking at.
So assuming I know that I should know what area it's in, so I'm going to type in Manistee.
And this is an actual city in Northern Michigan.
It's also the name of a county and it's also the name of a national park.
So let's go ahead and go to the city just for this example.
And as soon as I start zooming in, you can see
a lot of this green splotchy stuff all over this map.
If I zoom in further and let's say, I am pretty sure I know where my property is
it's I don't know, right at this corner or something, I can keep zooming in.
And actually, one kind of glitchy thing that I don't love about this map is that
as soon as you start zooming in relatively close, all those colors disappear.
And I don't know why because the map still works.
If I zoom out and click on this area,
it's going to tell me this entire area is owned by the forest service.
You can see what kind of access it has. This is open access. So that's good.
It shows you a lot of helpful data there, but now when I zoom in and then it disappears.
However, I can still click on it. And it's still going to show me that same information
and it's going to show me the outline.
So I don't know why the coloring disappears and why it gets all weird like that
but just so you know it does still work.
It just gets a little bit harder to pinpoint it, the closer you zoom in. So that's really helpful.
Now, if we zoom out and we kind of just scan across the state, we can see there's another
type of protected area and it's got a different color. And when we click on that, it shows us
information about this entire area owned by the Michigan department of natural resources,
which is awesome. See, again, this has open access, so that's really helpful as well.
We can keep zooming across the state here.
It looks like there's another type of area here.
This one's labeled as an American Indian area. We keep zooming across here.
This one is another one owned by the Michigan department of natural resources or the DNR,
as it's known around here.
When we zoom out, we can see a lot more stuff here.
And really the idea is, again, if you know where your property is and you zoom in close enough,
you can see, Hey, is there a protected area anywhere around my property?
And if so, which government entity owns that and what could be done on that property?
It doesn't get terribly specific, but again, just knowing what it is and where it is,
is really helpful. And I'll tell you, I also found this page here, which allows you to download
KMZ files or any individuals state in the US.
And the nice thing about this is that you can drop this
into Google Earth and see it on Google earth, which will allow you to zoom in a lot closer.
And I downloaded the one for Michigan, just to show you quickly
what happens when you download this thing.
So it's a pretty big file. And when you download the thing and unzip it, you'll see a lot of this stuff,
which to the average person, they might be like, "What is this? What am I to do with this?"
There's no read me file.
There's no real instructions anywhere about what to do or how to use it.
However, I'll just show you how I made sense of it.
So all I did was I found all the files I could that had a dot KMZ extension on it,
because that's the type of file.
Also KML files that work with Google Earth. And I found these five right here.
And all I had to do was drag them out of this folder, right on top of Google Earth, which I did.
And when I did that, it took like a couple minutes to process it, because again,
these are pretty big files. And once I did that, it showed me a lot of the same
splotchy colors over the state of Michigan. Just like this map did over here.
So on Google Earth, when we zoom in, you can see it works pretty much the same way.
It's just a little bit easier to work with because it's Google Earth.
And if you work with Google Earth a lot
you know it just has some nice controls
how you can kind of spin things around and look at things
in a more three-dimensional nature.
Especially if you have something like Parlay involved,
you can also put parcel lines on Google Earth and see where these protected areas fall
in relation to wherever the parcel lines are of your property.
And also you'll notice like this big red area,
that's like the entire lake Michigan area, which is a federal body of water.
I did notice over here. Like for example, if we look down here at this green area
and if I go to this one, this PADUSProc_lyr
When I uncheck that it takes away a lot of this
and gets a lot more specific about exactly where the areas are.
Whereas when I do click this, it's just like, blah, like all this huge green area.
And I know this is not all federal or state owned land.
So that's why I'm a little unclear about this particular one.
So you might want to consider taking that off.
If I zoom back out here, you'll also notice when I turn that on or off,
it affects all of the water areas as well.
So I don't know what to make of that one, but still,
if you do want to interact with this on Google Earth, these files are there
if you're willing to download the files and upload them here and just like the browser based map,
when you click on any of these areas,
it will show you all the same stuff as the browser based map
in terms of who the owner is and what kind of public access there is
and what the name of the park is, all that stuff.
Again, I will include a link to both this map
if you want to check out the status around the area of your property, wherever it is,
and also this page where you can download all of these KMZ zip files as well.
And again, I'm still not totally sure what to make of this whole thing.
Let's see what happens when I click on this.
So it looks like, hmm, interesting.
It looks like that might be an approved proclamation or extent boundary,
which kind of makes some more sense.
So not necessarily all this land is the Manistee national forest,
but the boundary in general goes out here,
even though some of this land within this boundary is privately owned.
That doesn't seem quite as useful or precise because at least for my purposes,
I would want to know who actually owns this property.
And if it's the government, what kind of government owned property is it?
What can be done on it? That kind of thing.
And just saying the boundary isn't going to be quite as helpful,
but again, you can turn that on and off as you wish.
So yeah, I just thought that was a useful thing to be aware of
and it's free, which is always a great price.
I hope you find that useful.
I wish you all the best. Talk to you next time.