Apple Pays Couple $1.7m For 1 Acre Plot 215
itwbennett writes "Chris Nerney is blogging about Apple's $1.7 million purchase of a 1-acre lot in Maiden, N.C. where it plans to build a $1 billion, 500,000 sq. ft. data center. The couple who owned the land, and the home that sat on the land, Donnie and Kathy Fulbright (hereafter known as Apple's shrewdest investors) reportedly 'rejected two previous offers from Apple before being told to name their price,' says Nerney."
blog spam (Score:5, Informative)
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To add some additional clarity: One acre = 220 feet x 220 feet (67 meters x 67 meters). This comes out to 48,400 square feet, or 4489 square meters. Not a huge amount of land, enough for one really nice lot for a home, or 3 to 4 average smaller city home lots here in the US.
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I always remember it as 66 x 660 from my days doing land surveying.
only 3 to 4 city lots in 1 acre? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm on a quarter acre ... I admit I don't have a huge house (1400 sq. ft), but it's a reasonable sized home in the suburbs, and I have good sized yard, which would be larger if it weren't for the garage in back (which means much of the yard is driveway). Most "smaller city homes" are much denser. And they tend to be multiple stories (which mine is not)
For Prince George's County, Maryland (just to the east of Washington, DC), the density residences (a duplex counts as 2 residences) in residential zones, not including apartments buildings are:
If you're in an area with on-street parking, and a small setback (ie, a "walk-up", without much of a front yard) and a small backyard, you can get 12 homes per acre easily. If it's detatched homes, in a city, 6-8 per acre could provide for a huge home.
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I understand what you are saying, but most URBAN lots are closer to the 1/4 acre size or often smaller. I have three houses, on 1.05 (3100 sqft), 1.48 (1700 sqft) and .28 acres (1300 sqft), and the lots over 1 acre I can subdivide into smaller lots if I wanted (I don't). In Guilford County NC, for instance (largest of a 1.5mil metro area) the required size for a lot IF THERE IS NO SEWER SERVICE is only .67 acres. Some upscale residential areas have their own requirements, but general code is must less th
Fair market price (Score:4, Funny)
Good for them. I wonder why apple wanted it so bad?
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Apple was building a $1Billion server farm on the property in North Carolina. Clearly they were the last holdout.
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That can happen here too; we call it "Eminent Domain". The thing is that one needs the local gummint in one's pocket. Sounds like Apple didn't have it or didn't want to use it.
There is *some* recourse about the amount of compensation but it requires suing (possibly in Federal court).
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In many states (Including North Carolina), Emminent domain cannot be used to transfer property from one private entity to another. It can only be used for "Public Use" projects, i.e. roads, railroads, utility cooridors, etc. If a property is siezed and not used for a "Public Use" project within a specified timeframe, most states have a mechanism for returning the siezed property to the owner it was siezed from.
If a property was siezed under Emminent domain, and not used for a Public use Project, it cannot
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The local government probably cost more than $1.7 million, and doing it that way would have taken longer.
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In the US, SCOTUS was apparently fine with municipalities using eminent domain for the benefit of developers. Had Apple decided to be evil, they probably could've gotten it for a small fraction of what the property was really worth.
The first part of what you said is true, but the Kato ruling doesn't prevent state and local governments from restricting eminent domain from benefiting private development. Many places did so after the fallout from that case.
Assuming the GP is correct and NC did that thing, Apple would have to take the time and money for a massive lobbying campaign to change the law, then ask for the land to be force-bought. It would've been much more expensive than the price they paid, very time-consuming, and very risk
Re:Fair market price (Score:5, Funny)
Good for them. I wonder why apple wanted it so bad?
I wonder why Slashdot posts summaries.
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To have a place for the links we use to melt down the servers. :-)
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So tell me, where it the summary or article does it explain why they needed that particular acre of land, as opposed to the other thousands of acres nearby? I'm sure there is a good reason, but it doesn't say. This is why I stopped paying attention to the news. Those "hard-hitting journalists" are too fucking stupid to ask even the most obvious of questions.
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So tell me, where it the summary or article does it explain why they needed that particular acre of land, as opposed to the other thousands of acres nearby? I'm sure there is a good reason, but it doesn't say.
From the summary: "Apple's $1.7 million purchase of a 1-acre lot in Maiden, N.C. where it plans to build a $1 billion, 500,000 sq. ft. data center"
So why did Apple need that "1-acre lot in Maiden, N.C."? Because that's "where it plans to build a $1 billion, 500,000 sq. ft. data center". It's hard to make it much clearer than that. A valid question then becomes "why did Apple plan to built the data center in that particular location?" but that's an entirely different question than "why did Apple want that
they got done Re:Fair market price (Score:2)
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I have a stupid question. (Score:2)
Exactly what is so damn special about that particular plot of land, anyway?
Re:I have a stupid question. (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously worth it to them. And probably about what they're used to paying for land in Cupertino. :b
Re:I have a stupid question. (Score:5, Interesting)
A quick check on some Cupertino real estate says that'll get you a home around 3500 sq. ft. on around 1/5 of an acre. Most land I saw in that price range was about 1/2 an acre. I expect commercial real estate is significantly higher.
So by their standards, it's a hell of a bargain.
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you're reading the story wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Their old plot was 1 acre, sold for this price, they took the money and built a new house on a 49 acre lot somewhere else.
Re:I have a stupid question. (Score:4, Informative)
No, the 49 acre piece of land is where they moved *to*. The price is for their old one acre lot..
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Orchard with a magic RDF & ancient Indian ceme (Score:5, Funny)
Since times immemorial it has been a magic orchard with a natural Reality Distortion Field of its own? ;-)
They even say if you dig RF-undead iPhone4s deep enough beneath the ancient apple trees, sometimes they return white-washed and fixed so you can hold them any way you like...
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Also, probably connecting their existing facilities to another plot of land would require licensing technology from Aperture Science.
Though now that I think of it Apple already supplies them with turrets so I suppose it's something else.
More details (Score:5, Informative)
The actual article is at Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-05/apple-s-data-needs-mean-1-7-million-jacuzzi-for-carolina-pair.html [bloomberg.com]
The article linked in the summary is just a blog post condensing the Bloomberg article, which contains much more information including the tax incentives that NC's state and local governments used to attract Apple, the revenue prospects those incentives were designed to entice, Apple's purposes in building the data center, and, for the human interest angle, more on the family involved and their plans for the proceeds from the land sale. Really, why in the world would anyone have submitted a crummy, abbreviated blog post over a decent article from a reputable source?
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Am I the only one who finds it extremely unsettling that Apple plans to run a $1B facility with up to 50 people and *maybe* employ up to 250 more minimum wage people for security etc?
That's a trend that's not going to go away. Welcome to the information economy where people are in a surplus. How long until a $10B facility is managed by 2 people (excluding the ISS)?
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Which never made sense to me. You've got this piece of property that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but you don't feel like paying for the training and equipment necessary to keep it secured.
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Am I the only one who finds it extremely unsettling that Apple plans to run a $1B facility with up to 50 people and *maybe* employ up to 250 more minimum wage people for security etc?
That's a trend that's not going to go away. Welcome to the information economy where people are in a surplus. How long until a $10B facility is managed by 2 people (excluding the ISS)?
Welcome to the Industrial revolution. Things that can be Automated are automated for the savings in manpower. Why should computers remain a labour intensive industry?
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That's true if you take it to that extreme.
If we understand improvements in technology as improvements in productivity, then there are a number of ways to split up the benefit from improved productivity: more capital, more leisure time, higher consumption. I think it's not a strange argument to suggest we should re-balance the benefit of increased productivity so that we accumulate capital and increase consumption at slower rates, while gradually increasing leisure time.
So.... What should they do? (Score:5, Informative)
Hire a bunch of people to sit around and do nothing, just so that they can say they are employing more people?
You realize that a non-trivial factor in our high quality of life is the amazing amount of automation we have. One person accomplishes so much more than they used to, in particular when it comes to trivial tasks. Time was, little got done other than getting food, because it is so important and it took so much time. Most humans spent a lot of their time on farming or hunting. Lead to a low standard of life. Large parts of our population did nothing but work on providing for our most basic need. Now? You get a few, highly educated, people and some heavy equipment and they can handle thousands of acres. Food can be produced cheap because it is so automated.
Same shit with data storage. Data is cheap and widely available because it is dirt cheap to store. Put a bunch of computers in a building and have a few people mind after them. That's all you need. However you can store and distribute massive amounts of data that way. Make it nice and cheap. Go back to the days of manual card catalogues and physical books and data was a privilege. You had to have money, power or connections to get easy access to data. Basically a university library with good ILL was the only way to truly have access to lots of data, and even then you had to wait and deal with problems. It was labour intensive to get and expensive to store.
Please remember that efficiency increases don't mean nobody works, it means people work in other areas, or accomplish more. For example in addition to IT support, I also do media for our department. I record talks and things like that. I can do that, because of modern technology. I record to a digital tape, dump it to computer, and edit it right there. Can be done with little of my time. As such, I can do it in addition to other duties. Were it all film, we'd need a dedicated person. Editing would take forever because it is literally a process of hand cutting the film and splicing it back together. Simple edits take a lot of manual time. Not with an NLE program. I can do an edit in a few seconds.
The idea is we automate more simple things and we can move on to more complex things. Also, it can simply needing to work less to have the same amount of benefit.
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One person accomplishes so much more than they used to, in particular when it comes to trivial tasks.
And yet, we are so much busier today.
Please remember that efficiency increases don't mean nobody works
Isn't that a problem? If efficiency just means there's more time for people to do more work, there's something seriously wrong with the world.
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TReally, why in the world would anyone have submitted a crummy, abbreviated blog post over a decent article from a reputable source?
AdWords traffic for their buddy or themselves? It's called blogspam for a reason. Maybe the /. editor should have done some editor work?
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There are no editors at /. None. Nada.
Never has been.
In fact, calling what Slashdot 'story submission approval' people do, 'editing', is an insult to editors everywhere!
Because it was blogspam. (Score:2)
Look at the submitter, look at the URL, sigh at timothy for accepting it in this form.
Wouldn't leasing it be a better deal? (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean...being paid that much money is like winning the lottery. The trouble I see with this is that many of the folks who won the lottery are not happy at all if this story [msn.com] or this one [usatoday.com] are to be believed.
I would have wanted Apple to pay me some regular good cash making me fluid till my last days on planet earth. How about that?
Re:Wouldn't leasing it be a better deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
So learn some self control and bank the single big payoff, then spend wisely for the remainder of your days. The article refers to the people winning then "losing" the money. They didn't lose it. They fucking blew the cash!
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I may well be wrong but that falls under cap gains you either buy something else with it or give uncle sam a HUGE chunk of it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thus why I said buying something makes a lot more sense than giving uncle Sam 15% of that difference.
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Capital gains taxes are generally not applicable to low-moderate income persons because they are spending the bulk of their money on their necessities and lack the free money needed to invest in hopes of realising a capital gain. For the wealthy who are the ones who actually have the money to invest the rate on capital gains is dramatically lower than they would be paying if their wealth were from earned income (rather than inheritance) which has a lot to do with how and why high-end jobs have their paymen
Re:Wouldn't leasing it be a better deal? (Score:4, Informative)
Not on sale of your primary residence. It's tax free. (though there might be a cap on that, I don't know)
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I mean...being paid that much money is like winning the lottery. The trouble I see with this is that many of the folks who won the lottery are not happy at all if this story or this one are to be believed.
The main problem I see with the lottery winners is simply that they got a huge amount of money without the experience of how to invest or save that money. I don't know whether the couple in question can handle the money better or not, but it's both not as big, hence, not as much a problem to invest and they might be shrewder investors, more able to handle that kind of money.
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"Lord, give me the chance to prove that winning the lottery won't spoil me."
Anyway, in all seriousness I bet [pun intended] I would be more controlled, although I would have some fun, likely splurging on some nice jewelry for instance :P
http://magiccards.info/query?q=mox&v=card&s=cname [magiccards.info]
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I doubt that applies to this couple as they were savvy enough to hold out for it and actually earn it.
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That makes Warren Buffett the biggest welfare recipient in the history of the world.
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Both your math and logic are profoundly flawed.
The fees do suck and do significantly reduce your actual rate of return from what is expected/advertised. However you can't just calculate the fees seperately from the interest since they are contingent on it and growth in the investment also increases the amount of fees you pay and the amount the fees amount to in reference to the original investment is completely irrelevant.
fools! (Score:4, Funny)
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Not sure about in America, but in Australia you don't own the mineral wealth under your property.
Re:fools! (Score:5, Informative)
You don't in America either. In fact, in America, you don't even really own the land. You only own the house and other "improvement" ON the land. You rent your land from the government for which you pay annual rent in the form of Property Tax (this is the feudal relationship between Lord and Sovereign that we fought a revolution to get away from, and we're right back there now).
We have this feudal title system in 48 states. It's possible to own land in allodium only in Texas and Nevada.
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Well that's interesting. My parents and several other family members in Pennsylvania are paid money by companies extracting natural gas from the bubble under their properties. Your acreage owned determines the amount you are paid.
While "minerals" aren't natural gas, I'm guessing it's more or less the same thing.
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Compensation for when the gas dome collapses and your house is destroyed in the ensuing cave-in. Or, as happened to my parents, an undocumented coal mine shaft collapses and your foundation cracks- but since it's undocumented, you can't get disaster compensation, your homeowner's insurance laughs at you, and you lose half the usable square footage of your house because an artesian spring opens up in your formerly finished basement.
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You should probably included the "IANAL" disclaimer, since you're wrong. (IANAL either)
You do own the land. You may or may not own the mineral rights. It's very common these days for the original developer of the land to retain mineral rights when they sell off the i
Re:fools! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. you are renting anything you must pay taxes on in regular schedule or forfeit. You do not own something if you must continue to pay for the privilege of possession. If it were anyone else, it'd be extortion. Shame if anything happened to your home...
That's a rather illogical argument. Not paying your taxes creates a lien as in any other debt. It's the same if you don't pay your mechanic bill. If you didn't pay your mechanic's bill, a court can seize your car and sell it off to pay the bill. The creditor has a right to receive payment; unfortunately, your creditor is also the government so they can and will readily enforce payment by any means at their disposal. With a mechanic it might take a while to go through the court system; with the government it's much faster.
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It varies from place to place. In urban and suburban areas, you typically do not own mineral rights. In rural areas you often do own those rights.
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People in Iraq don't own the oil under their land either.
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In the US, ranchers commonly sell "their" wildlife to hunters. The hunters have to get a permit, but the ranchers are deluded enough to think that they own the wildlife. The government lets them do it since in the US you can't just go onto somebody else's property without permission.
So, what you are saying is that the ranchers aren't really selling the wildlife but are selling access to their land. The government is selling the wildlife.
Data Center? (Score:3, Funny)
Jobs/Pixar had a better idea (Score:5, Funny)
What, so they were too good to attach a bunch of balloons to their house and fly it away? Greedy bastards.
Not so far from the truth (Score:2)
For the 1.7 million they will get, they can afford to buy a new piece of land and have the house moved down to it.
Obviously not by thousands of personal sized balloons.
For Those Curious (Score:3, Informative)
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500,000 square feet == 11.48 acres
== 46 450 m^2
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500,000 square feet == 11.48 acres
== 46 450 m^2
= 1.147842 square furlongs
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Which is around 114.7842 square chains :)
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Meters square? Pshaw I want it in Square meters.
Welcome, to the real world! (Score:2, Informative)
Or for the normal part of the world:
1 acre = 4 046.85642 square meters
4 047^(1 / 2) = 63.6160357 meters
1 700 000 / 4047 = 420 $ / square meter
500 000 * (square feet) = 46 451.52 square meters
And yeah:
46 451.52 / 4 046.86 = 11.4784104
11.48 * 1.7 = 19.5 million for all the real estate needed at the same price per square meter or 2% of the total cost for the data center even if they had paid the same amount for everyone.
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500,000 square feet == 11.48 acres
So, I suppose that means the new datacenter will be 12+ stories high.
So... (Score:2)
They're going to kill the fish in the pond in order to build the data center?
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Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
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I guess that is my fault for not fully reading articles. But I think that makes me more of a slashdot citizen than anything.
Property speculation (Score:3, Informative)
Beats working for a living. Just ask Donald Trump.
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You mean that guy who wound up almost a full billion in debt?
Real estate isn't child's play.
You still have to work, just with your brains instead of your muscles.
Bargain (Score:2)
Mis-characterized (Score:5, Informative)
Apple paid $1.7M for an acre adjoining their current datacenter FOR EXPANSION. Apple is not building a 500,000 square foot data center on a one acre lot as the post above would have you believe - to do so would require that Apple build the datacenter at least 12-14 stories tall, since one acre of land is only 43,560 square feet, and after taking in to consideration easements ten largest foot print for the building would be, say, 30,000 square feet (give or take)...
Thanks CaptainDefragged for link to actual Bloomberg piece on this purchase: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-05/apple-s-data-needs-mean-1-7-million-jacuzzi-for-carolina-pair.html?cmpid=yhoo [bloomberg.com]
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Steve would use this layout [wordpress.com]. When the iLife Clock blinks, it's time to think different.
Combating what? (Score:3, Funny)
>>Combating Joblessness
Google has hired more than 80 employees at the site, said spokeswoman Emily Wood....<<
Sounds to me like the town of Maiden is combating Jobslessness.
Google did the same to a church (Score:2)
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Actually I think, if I understand it correctly, it was the neighbour plot where the datacenter will be. We don't know what plans Apple has for the plot that this story was about.
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From reliable sources, I understand this acre of land will be used to build part of the reality distortion field around the data center.
Seems like a lot of money just to hide a data center though. It would have been cheaper for Steve to have just declared that anyone claiming there was a data center there was using their eyes wrong.