My Experience Buying Land from the State of Alaska

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The State of Alaska offers non residents the ability to buy land directly from the state.

When I was first looking for potential homestead land back in Colorado, I stumbled upon an amazing opportunity. Alaska will sell land to non-residents through a special over-the counter land purchase program.

Disclaimer: The land I am writing about in this article does not have a cabin on it, yet! This is as of 2020.

Most of the land parcels are located in remote areas and can only be accessed by bush plane or snow-machine. In 2013 I purchased some land using this method and I traveled to Alaska to survey the land personally, using my GPS.



In all I bought two lots of around 5 acres each. The first lot was $4400, and the second lot was $3500. Once buying them I wanted to go up to Alaska to check out the land for myself. so I charted a float plane to for my flight up to Shell Lake Alaska.

I spent an amazing week in the bush of Alaska, completely by myself. It is the most remote place on earth that I have ever been. 50 miles from the closest road, the 5 acre parcel of land that I bought is completely covered in birch and spruce trees, along with a lot of brush.

You could hear wolves howling in the night when I was there, even though it was August and the sun didn’t go down till nearly midnight. When I returned to Anchorage from the trip, I found another 5 acres near by and bought it too, for a total of 10 acres.

As mentioned before, most of the lots are remote in nature, however you might occasionally find a diamond in the rough. The reality is though that you have to be one tough mother to build a remote homestead in places like this. It’s very hard to get in and out of there without your own plane.

If you want to take a look at the State of Alaska’s land sales page, here is the URL. https://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/landsales/otc/

One of the great things about this program is that they also will extend credit to you, financing your land at a rate of around 3% over prime rate. This is an amazing deal because it really does give the average American the ability to afford this land.

Here is some information about how they finance the land. https://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/landsales/info/financing/

My experience was very good in this process. Entering into the contract took a few months. Alaska is a long ways away and this is a government process, so don’t expect this to go quickly.

Once you are under contract, you can finance the land in monthly payments over 5 to 20 years! If you are very strategic you could probably finance a really nice piece of large acreage and make it into a nice, yet remote and rugged homestead.

All payments for the land can be made online or by mail, making it an easy process overall. After the term of my contract was complete and my land was paid off, the state will start the process of patenting the lot.

A land patent is essentially how governments convert public land to private land. Land patents are granted by a sovereign power, like the State of Alaska. The person buying the land is called the grantee. You can be granted land without buying it, and the process of doing that is also a patent.

Once the patent is completed you will receive a stamped and notorized official Patent Deed from the State. At this point the land will be officially owned by you. Over the next 3-6 months your land will start to show up in the borough (county) database of land records.

It’s important to know that you cannot sell the land to another person until the land patent has been granted. Until that time you are still under contract and the contact is not necessarily transferable.

So now I own 10 area of remote land in Alaska. It is amazingly beautiful and was truly worth the purchase. I plan to eventually build a small trapper cabin out there, but probably not a permanent residence.

So that’s the story of how I bought my remote land from the State of Alaska. I hope that this article was helpful to you. If you liked it please don’t hesitate to give it a share or comment! Thank you!