Want to progress beyond a back yard for keeping your chickens and growing your potatoes? Then it’s time to buy into a proper smallholding. The trouble is they don’t often come up in the local paper, but these sites can help.

Greenshifters has smallholdings both for sale and for rent, and a separate category in which wannabe owners can post ‘wanted’ ads. It feels far more friendly and approachable than a big commercial estate agency, but the self-posted nature of the adverts is variable, and you get far more information on some properties than others. There’s a good UK focus, which puts it ahead of better-known alternatives like eBay, and we love the way that there are RSS feeds for each category so you can keep an eye on just the properties for sale, if that’s your need, without logging onto the site every day. At the time of writing there were 71 properties for sale, sortable by location, price and, perhaps most usefully, size.

Rural Smallholdings Magazine handles more than just property sales – it’s also a good place to look for breeders if you need to stock your fields and barns with animals. Nonetheless it has a small number of smallholdings for sale, a property of the week, and some rental opportunities. These can be delivered to you by RSS, but be aware that if you subscribe to this service you’ll also get editorial features delivered in the same stream. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as the content is informative and well-written, but it means it’s not as clear-focussed as Greenshifters.

The Smallholding Centre is an agency based in south Wales, specialising in smallholdings in that area. It also deals in cottages, equestrian properties, barns for conversion and properties with money-making opportunities. The site itself is in need of some serious TLC as the design is very dated and looks decidedly hand-cranked. The index could do with re-thinking, too, as your main link to the properties on offer is a list of price ranges in £100,000 bands from ‘under £200,000′ to ‘over £500,000′. We’d prefer divisions on the basis of property type or location. Nonetheless, if you’re looking to escape the cities and start afresh in Wales, this is a good place to start looking.

Primelocation is the biggest site here dedicated to selling property, but it’s probably better known for its handling of regular houses and flats than it is for farms and land. Nonetheless, there is an entry for just that in its ‘UK buy’ menu bar, allowing you to search available properties on location, price range, property type and freeform keywords. It offers to keep you updated with emails of matching results or your can subscribe to an RSS feed of the same, and it plots advertised properties on an overview map alongside its listings so you can see at a glance which are of interest. It’s not quite so focused on smallholdings as Greenshifters, and you may have to spend some time scrolling past irrelevant building plots and development opportunities, but as all adverts are posted by agents the write-ups are generally comprehensive and likely to be very accurate.

eBay has a wide selection of properties for sale, from decommissioned nuclear silos to whole villages and towns. To find smallholdings, you’re best off searching the Residential Property category on the term ‘farm’. Our search turned up 43 results at the time of writing, which is impressive, but many were for overseas property, with a particular slant on Bulgaria, and there were a few holiday lets in there, too, which was not at all relevant. Still, if you’re happy to pick your way through the less interesting entries it’s a good place to keep an eye on, and as you can save your search as an RSS feed you don’t need to keep returning day after day.

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