When I was shopping for land before settling on my lease, I toured two parcels where sellers voluntarily handed me lease histories as a selling point. Both times, I treated those documents as something close to gospel. Big mistake in thinking.
What those histories never showed: the informal grazing arrangements that happened between formal leases, the years land sat idle and compacted, the hunting camps that had fuel storage sitting on the property. I only learned these things by knocking on neighboring fences and talking to people who had actually watched the land for decades.
Neighbors are your real due diligence. A seller controls what goes into a disclosure packet. The retired rancher next door controls nothing except his memory, and he will tell you things no document ever will.
I now consider any lease history provided by a seller as a starting point for questions, not answers. It tells me what someone wanted me to know, which is different from what I need to know.
Has anyone else found that informal neighbor conversations completely changed their read on a property's history?