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I live in Franklin County near Youngsville and have owned the same house for 15 years. I am anti-HOA and if you are too you can undoubtedly find some land in rural counties such as Franklin County that will give you enough buffer to not have to worry so much about what your neighbors might do. In our case we probably could have used some sort of HOA protection initially because the land next to ours was sold and the new owner put 3 single wide trailers on it for rentals; there was already a double wide on it. I'm sure it had a negative impact on our property value, but as someone that does not plan to move it wasn't too big of a deal. Plus the people that lived there were usually pretty nice. However, the nice thing about living on some HOA-free acreage is that we were free to build a 600ft 8ft tall fencing between the properties. I was also able to build a rather large garage and a pool without HOA mini-gov't intervention. We take very good care of our property and try to make it look nice, but you can't guarantee that your neighbors will. You basically just have to take the positive with the negative.
Another option that I have experience with in our area is land that can be purchased with convenants attached. I have some land in Vance county that the original owner subdivided and sold separately. There is no HOA but the covenants on the deed (which we had to agree to) stated that no mobile homes were allowed, no livestock other than horses, and no more than 3 homes could be built on the acerage if we decided to subdivide it later for family or whatever. I believe there were a couple more restrictions, but I can't remember what they are. None of them were too unreasonable and absolutely none of the restrictions involved grass cutting, siding colors or anything regarding your mailbox. For me this is a good middle ground.
Unfortunately 95% or better of the people moving here want a subdivision so their kids will be around lots of other kids. I would much rather be in a stand alone house with a mountain behind me and water in front of me, without another house within walking distance. But good luck selling that when you need to. In the Triangle, a SFH by itself without lots of kids around is selling to a smaller segment of the buying population. Just something to think about.
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