Buying Land in Mohave County, Arizona

One of the country's largest stocks of older, small-lot subdivisions

Mohave County is enormous -- about 13,461 square miles, the fifth-largest county in the United States by area, with a 2025 estimated population of roughly 228,000 spread thin across it. A large share of its unincorporated land sits inside sprawling subdivisions platted and marketed decades ago, well before Arizona's modern subdivision-disclosure and water-supply rules existed. Golden Valley, between Kingman and Bullhead City, traces to a Hollywood-based development company that platted the land south of State Route 68 into 2.5-acre parcels and sold them for $695 apiece on $10-down, $10-a-month installment terms -- an approach typical of the era's mass land-sales industry. Golden Shores, along the Colorado River near Lake Havasu City, and Meadview, near Lake Mead, followed similar mid-to-late-20th-century patterns aimed at retirees and seasonal buyers.

None of this makes a lot in these areas unbuyable -- these are long-settled communities with real homes and residents. But it does mean a buyer should treat the original subdivision-era marketing and plat as historical background, not a guarantee of current infrastructure. Confirm actual road access, utility availability, and well/septic feasibility for the specific lot you're considering, ideally with a site visit and direct contact with Development Services, rather than relying on the subdivision's general reputation or a decades-old plat map.

The county's real, current zoning code

Separate from the older-subdivision issue, Mohave County does have a genuine, actively maintained Zoning Ordinance for unincorporated land, adopted in 2015 and revised multiple times since -- most recently in 2024. Development Services' Planning & Zoning Division administers it, maintaining the county's General Plan, the Zoning Ordinance itself, and Subdivision Regulations as required under Arizona statute. Named zones include A (General), A-D (Airport Development), A-R (Agricultural-Residential), R-E (Residential-Recreation), R-1 (Single-Family Residential), R-2 (Single-Family Medium-Density/Multi-Family Low-Density), R-MH (Manufactured Homes), and R-RV (Recreational Vehicle), among others, with minimum lot sizes that vary by zone and are sometimes appended directly to the zone designation (for example, R-1/10M denoting a specific minimum lot size). Confirm the specific zone and its current minimum lot size and permitted uses directly with Development Services for any parcel -- don't assume from a neighboring property's use.

6,000-plus roads the county has never formally accepted

The single most consequential, county-specific fact for a buyer here may be this: Mohave County has documented more than 6,000 roads that exist on paper, or by long tradition of public use, but that have never gone through the formal process required for the county to actually maintain them -- a road has to meet certain legal and physical standards and be formally accepted by a vote of the Board of Supervisors before the county will grade, pave, or otherwise service it. Some of this legacy traces to Revised Statute 2477, a repealed 1866 federal law that allowed public rights-of-way to form across private land simply through historical use before it was repealed in 1976; more than 3,100 miles of road in the county reportedly trace to that provision. In practice, this means a road that looks established, has a name, and has served an older subdivision like a Golden Valley or Havasu Heights-area development for decades can still fall outside the county's maintenance responsibility. See this site's dedicated private roads page for Mohave County for the county's actual road-acceptance petition process, physical standards, and paving-assessment options -- not just the scale of the problem.