Young County, Texas Land: The 10-Acre Unrestricted Guide to Promised Land Valley (2026)

Real land, real water, real freedom — 7 minutes from Olney, between Fort Worth and Abilene.

Rodrigo Blanco — Founder of TerraFunded

Published: 2026-04-24

Most people who text me about Young County ask the same two questions, stacked on top of each other: "Can I actually put a mobile home on this?" and "Is there really water?"

They've been burned before. They've looked at rural Texas land where the deed restrictions run eight pages long, or where the seller says "water is nearby" and what that actually means is a $45,000 well that might or might not hit.

I'm Rodrigo Blanco. I run TerraFunded, operating under Longhorn Money Services, LLC out of Dallas. Over the last few years we've closed more than $15 million in Texas land sales and put over 350 families on their own acreage — most of whom had never owned anything bigger than a car, and most of whom couldn't get a bank mortgage to save their lives.

I'm writing this guide because our Promised Land Valley project near Olney is one of the most honest pieces of land I've ever sold, and also one of the most misunderstood. People hear "Young County" and picture desert. They hear "no restrictions" and don't believe it. They hear "owner financing" and assume there's a catch.

This post is the full picture: what the land is, what the water is, what the numbers are, and what you're actually buying when you put $7,000 down and start paying $1,600 a month for 10 acres you own free and clear on day one.

The short answer, if you're in a hurry

Item	Detail
Location	Promised Land Valley, 7 minutes from Olney, Texas (Young County)
Between	~115 miles from Fort Worth (TX-114) and ~90 miles from Abilene
Tract size	18 tracts of 10 acres + 1 tract of 20 acres
Terrain	Flat open pasture, drainage study verified excellent runoff
Water	Underground water confirmed. Two existing wells producing 2+ GPM each
Deed restrictions	None. Cattle, homes, RVs, mobile homes, barndominiums all allowed
Cash price	$110,000
Owner-financed	$7,000 down, $1,600/month, 10 years, 10% fixed interest
Prepayment penalty	None. Pay it off whenever you want
Deed	Warranty Deed at closing — you own it on day one
Credit check	No credit check. No income verification
Property tax rate	~2.25% median effective in Young County (varies by jurisdiction)

If that already makes sense to you and you want to stop reading, text me and I'll send you the exact plat map with available tracts. Otherwise, keep going — the rest of this post explains why each of those numbers matters.

Why Young County hits the sweet spot between Fort Worth and Abilene

Most of the Texas land content online is about two places: East Texas (Piney Woods, close to Dallas) or the Hill Country (near Austin and San Antonio). Those markets are already expensive. A 10-acre tract within two hours of Dallas on the east side starts around $150K–$250K, and anything within an hour of Austin is priced like suburban real estate.

Young County is different, and the geography is the main reason.

Olney sits in north-central Texas, about 115 miles west of Fort Worth via Texas State Highway 114, about 90 miles northeast of Abilene, and 45 miles south of Wichita Falls. That's three mid-sized cities in a triangle, with Olney roughly in the middle. From the land, you can be at a Costco-sized grocery store in 45 minutes, at a regional airport in about an hour, and at a major metro in under two and a half hours — in three different directions.

For most of our buyers, that triangle is the pitch. You're not 45 minutes from a city, which is what drives prices up everywhere else. You're 2 hours from three cities. That gives you rural pricing with metro access when you need it.

A few other things worth knowing about Young County if you're new to it:

Cattle country with real history. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association was founded in Graham (the Young County seat) in 1877. Five generations of ranchers selected this soil, grass, and drainage before anyone tried to subdivide it.
Oil-and-gas country too, since the 1920s. The boom is long over, but the infrastructure it left behind — roads, utilities, grocery stores, a hospital — is stable and in place.
Rural, not empty. Population is ~17,900 county-wide and ~3,000 in Olney. Hamilton Hospital (established 1908, currently expanding), Olney ISD, local electric and telephone co-ops, and a proprietary city lake. Climate is humid subtropical: hot summers, mild winters, ~27–30 inches of rain a year. Not desert. Not swamp. Just Texas.

Young County is what smart investors call "still affordable" and what actual residents call "the way Texas used to be." Both are true.

What 10 acres at Promised Land Valley actually look like

Let me describe the land itself, because a lot of Texas land listings show you aerial stock photos and not the real property.

Promised Land Valley is a 19-tract subdivision we created on a single larger parcel about 7 minutes from downtown Olney. Of the 19 tracts, 18 are 10 acres each and one is 20 acres. The 20-acre tract usually goes first — if you want it, don't wait.

Topography: flat. Genuinely flat. Not "gently rolling" (real estate code for "you'll need to regrade before you build"). Flat. This matters because flat land means easier foundations, easier septic permits, easier fencing, and easier cattle management.

Vegetation: open pasture. Native grasses with scattered mesquite, which is the standard for this part of Texas. You can drive across most of it today without a bush hog. If you want to plant something — hay, improved grass, a shelterbelt — the land is already cleared enough to start tomorrow.

Drainage: before we subdivided, we ran a formal drainage study over a rainy season to make sure water moves the way we thought it did. It does. Runoff clears fast, there's no standing water after normal rain events, and none of the tracts sit in a depression that would fail a septic perc test. I'll send you the study if you ask.

Roads: every tract has road frontage. No landlocked interior lots. You can drive up to your acreage from day one.

Utilities: electricity is available at the perimeter via the local co-op. Water is the one we solved differently, and that's the next section.

The water question: what we actually found under this land

In rural Texas, water is the difference between a dream tract and an expensive mistake. I've seen buyers spend $30,000 drilling a dry well, then another $20,000 drilling a second one, then walk away. That's not a horror story — it's Tuesday in the rural land business.

Before we sold a single tract at Promised Land Valley, we paid a geologist for a full soil and subsurface study. The study came back saying there was a viable aquifer under the property. Then we did the thing most developers skip: we drilled test wells. Two of them.

Both wells came in producing more than 2 gallons per minute of clean water. For context:

A standard household uses about 1 GPM peak demand for normal living (two showers, a dishwasher, laundry).
2+ GPM is enough for a home plus a stock tank plus some cattle.
Most Texas counties consider a well "viable for residential use" at 1 GPM or above.

What this means for you as a buyer: when you drill your well on your tract, you're not gambling. The geology has already been proven on the same parcel. Most of our buyers budget $8,000–$15,000 for a well depending on depth and how fancy they go with the pump system. That's a real number, not a guess.

If you want to see the location of the existing wells relative to the plat, I'll show you on the map. It's part of the tour.

What "no deed restrictions" actually means — and what still applies

"Unrestricted" is the word that makes buyers lean forward in their chair. But most people don't actually know what it means. Let me explain both sides.

What no deed restrictions means at Promised Land Valley:

You can park an RV and live in it full-time, permanently. You can put a single-wide or double-wide mobile home, any year, any condition (within Texas state law).
You can build a barndominium, a traditional stick-built house, a log cabin, or a yurt. No HOA will tell you what color your front door has to be.
You can run cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses. No livestock restrictions.
You can operate a small business from the property — a welding shop, a mechanic's garage, a kennel. You can hunt on your own land. You can subdivide your 10 acres into smaller pieces later if you want, subject to Young County rules.
You can keep a junk vehicle on your back forty if you want to. No aesthetic covenants.

What still applies, even without deed restrictions:

Texas state septic rules. You need an approved septic system for any permanent structure with plumbing. OSSF (On-Site Sewage Facility) rules apply. Standard.
Young County building setbacks. You can't build right on the property line. Typical setbacks apply.
Floodplain and drainage rules if you somehow end up in a designated floodplain. (Promised Land Valley is not in one.)
State wildlife rules — hunting seasons, bag limits, Texas Parks & Wildlife regulations.
Federal environmental rules — if you somehow have a wetland or a protected species, you deal with the feds. (You don't on this land.)

That's it. The combination of "no deed restrictions" plus "still following Texas state and Young County law" is the actual real-world flexibility most people want. You're free to live how you want without HOA-style micromanagement, but you're not in some legal no-man's-land.

One more thing worth saying: I don't have deed restrictions because my buyers don't want them. Period. A lot of developers put 30 pages of restrictions on their tracts to "protect property values," which is real estate code for "make sure nobody actually uses the land." I'd rather have buyers who use their land.

The numbers: cash vs. owner-financed, with no hype

Here's the full price structure for a 10-acre tract at Promised Land Valley:

If you pay cash

$110,000 total. Closed through a Texas title company. Warranty Deed transferred at closing. You own it outright on day one.
Closing costs are roughly $1,500–$2,500 depending on the title company's fee schedule and whether you want title insurance (I recommend it).
Property tax for the year of closing is typically prorated at the title company so you pay only your share.

If you finance with me

Down payment: $7,000
Monthly payment: $1,600
Term: 10 years (120 months)
Interest rate: 10% fixed for the life of the loan
Prepayment penalty: none
Credit check: none
Income verification: none

Over the full 10-year term, if you paid every month and never paid ahead, you'd pay $7,000 down plus roughly $192,000 in monthly payments, for a total of about $199,000 on a tract that sells for $110,000 cash.

I'm being direct about that number because I want you to make an informed choice, not a rushed one.

The real trade-off is this: a bank mortgage at today's rates would run you 6.5–7.5%, assuming you qualified. I charge 10%. That's a 2.5–3 point spread. On a $110,000 tract, that spread costs roughly $30,000 in extra interest over 10 years.

So the honest question is: is 10 years of access to the land, with no bank approval, no credit check, no income documentation, and a Warranty Deed on day one, worth $30,000 to you?

For most of my buyers, the answer is yes — because they can't get the bank mortgage at all, or because getting approved would take 6–12 months of paperwork and might still fail. Owner financing is faster, simpler, and available to people the banking system won't serve.

And if your situation changes — you get a bonus, you sell another asset, you win a settlement — you pay early with no penalty. I've had more than a few buyers pay off their land in 2–3 years instead of 10. That cuts the total interest dramatically.

The math only looks bad if you assume you'll ride the full 10 years. Most people don't.

One more note: Young County property taxes run around 2.25% effective rate on the assessed value, per Young Central Appraisal District records. On raw land with no improvements, the assessed value is usually much lower than the purchase price, so annual property tax on a bare 10-acre tract typically comes in between $400 and $900 a year. If you want the exact number before you close, I'll pull the parcel's current assessment.

Who's actually buying at Promised Land Valley

I get asked this constantly: "Who else is buying here? Am I weird for wanting this?"

You're not. Here are the three profiles that keep showing up in my texts about this property.

Profile 1: The cattle buyer

Mid-40s to mid-60s. Usually already works with livestock, professionally or on weekends at a relative's place. Wants their own 10 acres to run a small herd — typically 3 to 6 cow-calf pairs on 10 acres in this grazing zone. They're not trying to make a living off cattle; they're trying to have cattle. Big difference. For this buyer, the water is the whole conversation. Two proven wells, flat pasture, road access, no HOA telling them where the stock tank can go. They close fast.

Profile 2: The build-your-own-house buyer

30s to 50s. Either paying rent in Fort Worth, Arlington, or Abilene and tired of it, or already own a house in a city and want a weekend/retirement property with a plan to build. They park an RV or a small cabin on the land first, save up, then put up a barndominium or traditional house over 2–5 years. For this buyer, "no restrictions" is the whole pitch — they want to put up a metal building, a greenhouse, a workshop, and be left alone.

Profile 3: The investor

30s to 70s. Already owns one or two pieces of real estate. Sees raw Texas land as an inflation hedge and a generational asset. Might not develop the property for 5–10 years, or might eventually put up a small structure and rent it as a hunting lease. For this buyer, the owner financing is the pitch: $7,000 down on a $110,000 asset is leverage that's impossible through a bank on raw land. Banks rarely finance undeveloped land — and when they do, they want 30–50% down.

Most of my Young County buyers fall somewhere between two of these profiles. The land works for all three.

Living near Olney: what the area is like day to day

Olney itself has about 3,000 residents and runs on agriculture, oil and gas, a small manufacturing base, and a few long-running institutions. Here's what you'll actually use:

Groceries, gas, hardware, feed — all available in town. For a bigger shopping trip (Walmart, H-E-B, Costco), you'll drive to Wichita Falls (~45 min) or Graham (~30 min).
Healthcare. Hamilton Hospital in Olney has been operating since 1908 and is currently expanding. For anything specialized, you'll go to Wichita Falls or Fort Worth.
Schools. Olney ISD is the local district and is well-regarded for a small-town district.
Airport. Regional flights via Wichita Falls (~45 min); DFW International (~2.5 hours) for anything else.

Climate is humid subtropical: July highs in the mid-90s, occasional winter freezes, 27–30 inches of rain annually — enough for pasture grass, not so much you fight mud year-round. Hunting and fishing are serious here: whitetail, dove, quail, hogs; bass and crappie in the regional lakes.

The honest downside: Olney is small. If you want Thai food, a symphony, or a 24-hour gym, you're driving. Some people hear that and love it. Some realize rural Texas isn't for them. Both reactions are valid.

The closing process, step by step

This is the exact sequence from first text to having the deed in your name.

Step 1: First contact and tract selection. You text me at +1 (216) 630-4560. I answer personally. We talk 10–20 minutes about what you're looking for. I send you the current plat showing which tracts are available (some sell before others). If you want to see the land in person, we schedule a visit — most buyers do, and I recommend it.

Step 2: Written offer and terms. Once you pick a tract, I send a written purchase agreement with exact terms ($7,000 down, $1,600/month, 10 years, 10% fixed, specific tract ID). You sign, and send earnest money (typically $500–$1,000, credited toward your down payment).

Step 3: Title company and escrow. I open escrow with a licensed Texas title company. They run a title search to confirm clear title and order a survey if needed. This takes 1–3 weeks.

Step 4: Closing documents. The title company prepares the closing package: Warranty Deed, Deed of Trust (if financed), Promissory Note (if financed), and all standard Texas land documents.

Step 5: Closing day. You sign at the title company — in person, or remotely via mobile notary if you live out of state. You wire the rest of your down payment. The Warranty Deed is filed with Young County.

Step 6: You own the land. Title recorded. First monthly payment is due roughly 30 days after closing. The property is yours, with a recorded deed, from day one.

Most closings go from "I'm ready" to "it's yours" in 3 to 6 weeks. I've done them faster when the buyer is in a hurry.

Want the longer version of how the financing itself works? I wrote a separate piece on that: How Owner Financing Actually Works. And if you want the step-by-step of the whole TerraFunded process across any property: How It Works.

Frequently asked questions

Is Young County a good investment or am I buying in the middle of nowhere?

Young County is "the middle of somewhere." It's 115 miles from Fort Worth on a state highway, not off a dirt road. Land values in north-central Texas have been appreciating steadily for over a decade, and rural counties like Young are currently cheaper per acre than any comparable county within 2 hours of a major metro. Whether it's a "good investment" depends on your time horizon — I'd say 5 years minimum to see meaningful appreciation, 10+ years to see the full benefit.

Can I really live in an RV on this land?

Yes, full-time, permanently. No restriction stops you. You'll want to get a septic system installed for long-term living (Texas OSSF rules apply), and you'll want to confirm with Young County on any permits for long-term RV residency, but at the deed level, nothing restricts it.

How much does it cost to drill a well on my tract?

Typical range is $8,000–$15,000 for a residential well drilled to the depth we've proven out, including casing and a basic pump system. Fancier pump systems, deeper drilling, or a pressure tank upgrade add cost. This is a real number, not an estimate — our existing two wells on the parent parcel are the reference point.

Will property taxes jump if I build a house?

Yes, and you should plan for it. Raw land in Young County is assessed at a much lower value than improved land. When you put a house on the tract, the county reassesses and your annual property tax typically goes from $400–$900 (raw) to several thousand per year, depending on the value of the improvement. Budget for it.

Can non-U.S. citizens buy this land?

Yes. Texas allows non-citizens to own land. We close with foreign buyers regularly. You'll need a valid form of government-issued ID (passport works), a U.S. bank account or wire capability to make payments, and a mailing address where we can send monthly statements. No green card or visa required to purchase.

What happens if I miss a payment?

Grace period of 15 days on each monthly payment. If you're going through something — medical, job loss, family emergency — call me. I'd rather work out a catch-up plan than start any process against a buyer. In 5 years and 350+ families, this has rarely been a problem. The people who finance land with me are usually the most committed buyers I've ever met.

Can I pay off the loan early?

Yes, with no prepayment penalty. Pay the remaining balance whenever you want. Many of my buyers pay off in 2–5 years and save substantial interest.

Is TerraFunded a real company and how do I verify it?

TerraFunded operates as Longhorn Money Services, LLC, a registered Texas entity at 3838 Oak Lawn Avenue, Suite 1000, Dallas, TX 75219. You can verify the entity at the Texas Secretary of State's public records. Every closing goes through a licensed Texas title company. Every deed is filed with the county. If anything about a transaction doesn't pass your verification, it shouldn't happen.

What to do next

If you've made it this far, you're either seriously considering this land or writing a very thorough piece of research. Either way, here's how to move forward.

If you want to buy: text me directly at +1 (216) 630-4560. Tell me which tract profile fits you (10-acre standard, or the 20-acre), whether you want to visit in person first, and whether you're going cash or financed. I'll send you the current plat and we'll go from there.

If you want to compare first: check our full inventory at the marketplace. We have other Texas properties across multiple counties, and the right one for you might not be Young.

If you want to learn more about the financing itself before committing: read How Owner Financing Actually Works.

If you want to think about it: bookmark this post, visit the property, talk to your family. Land is a 10-year decision minimum. Make it the way you'd make any 10-year decision — slowly, with all the information, and with someone on the other side of the deal who answers his own phone.

That's me. I answer my own phone. Text anytime.

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Rodrigo Blanco Founder, TerraFunded (Longhorn Money Services, LLC) Dallas, Texas Text: +1 (216) 630-4560 About TerraFunded

For the interactive version with related properties and contact info, please visit the original article.