The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.

I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.

Lol $30k profit? On what? Good luck selling the place when it required inspections for the new owners to mortgage and insure it.

Lol some boomer slumlord would buy it for cash to rent out if nothing else, considering I could sell for 1/3 the price of anything remotely similar and still break even.

Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.

Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.

I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.

Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.

You must not be that rural if stuff was being bid up. Run down doesn't mean burnt out. The thesis is that your house is likely unmortgagable/uninsurable if you ignored the permits etc.

But I have a legal permit. And that permit says I don't have to get it inspected, or need or license, or get code compliance checks. I used a rarely used 'loophole' to get that explicitly stated on my permit.