[deepinthewoods]

Buy if you can afford it - They are not making it anymore!

That still doesnt make it a worthwhile investment, does it?

i would buy land if i could.

[Beewyched]

Buy if you can afford it - They are not making it anymore!

That still doesnt make it a worthwhile investment, does it?

i would buy land if i could.

Me too - it's like Mission Impossible trying to rent land for pigs (even cute, wee, furry ones    )

[lachlanandmarcus]

land is cheaper some places than others.... Our place here with 40 acres is the same value roughly as a 2 bed Victorian mid terrace with no drive or garage we moved from in Hertfordshire....:-))))

[Small Farmer]

and the big farms around here (Beds/Herts border) all earn rent from business units.  Beats farming...

[bazzais]

If you buy land at the right price - your never going to lose 'value' with it.  Full stop.

[Mallows Flock]

Until very recently per acre in Somerset (unless moorland) was 6-7 grand per acre but thanks to the giant sheep farmers locally who are buying whole farms at £10 per acre, thats now what we pay. Smaller plots make up to 25,000 for areas even under an acre. Blimmin' criminal! LOL. And that's just GRAZING land!

[Small Farmer]

If you buy land at the right price - your never going to lose 'value' with it.  Full stop.

You could say the same about Greek bonds!  But determining "the right price" for land ain't that easy - just ask the Irish or the Spanish.

[bazzais]

A 'bond' is a construct - land is well, land.

[bazzais]

If the s**t hits the fan and the constructs of money evaporated - we'd have to go back to subsistance living - and for that you need land. - But hey thats not really the main reason I think that purchasing land is a dead cert, but a basic point.

As for buying land at £10 per acre - probably some kind of tax scam rather than a true reflection of what the new owner actually had to pay for the land.

If you could buy land at £10 per acre, their would be a cigar flicking fight at a game of craps one evening over a bottle of the finest scotch.

[bazzais]

If you sell a farm, even though a farm is not normally subject to business tax - you will have to pay tax on any profits made from the sale of the land but not the 'house'

So you sell the land at a reduced price and place the main value on the homestead.

[Simple Simon]

I happen to agree that land can be a good store of value but there's a big pile of "subject to" matters.  Land can be


- boggy, lumpy, or otherwise difficult to use
- blighted by planners
- inflated by hope value
- subject to easements etc
- plagued by neighbours
- contaminated
- remote from markets


There is a market price for Spanish bonds even today.  Big volumes can be traded because there is market liquidity.  But there is no clearing price for Spanish property at all.  Individual properties are traded but on a very small scale and at prices which continue to head down.  A lot of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Irish property is simply impossible to price - because there are no buyers, and there are no mortgages for any buyers there might be.


The UK is differently placed.  There hasn't been a real residential property crash yet.  That's because interest rates are about zero and lenders are showing considerable forbearance in the face of significant problems with their borrowers.  Remember negative equity in the eighties when the banks acted much faster?  When the economy does recover all that quantitive easing printed money will turn into inflation unless interest rates rise - except that colossal numbers of mortgages will then become unaffordable.


That current house prices are unaffordable already is a fact.  There is a big demand for affordable housing driven by family sizes shrinking rather than pure population growth. This implies that a lot of existing property is too big for the new smaller family units - but it is certainly too expensive.


Farmland prices are anomalous.  Many highly mechanised farmers make modest or negative returns while paying rents that yield tiny returns to landowners.  The stunning growth in crop yields and milk outputs have been negated by lower prices paid by supermakets so the farm of today requires someone to invest truly vast sums of capital which make a negligible return.  But then there's the capital gain isn't there?  Well, there is for vast institutional quality estates, but I'm unconvinced that all the land that will be sold by farmers giving up the business is capable of being absorbed by the rest.


I think I've argued myself into selling while I can....


 

[aliceinwonderland]

Just to give a different perspective on land prices...
Here in financially ok Australia (thanks to our huge mineral resources, and China's huge demand), prices aren't that different, really:


In the area where I grew up, and where I want to return to when I can (central Victoria), prices can range anywhere between $2500 per acre up to $15000 per acre (that's about 1600 pounds to just under 10,000 pounds per acre, at the current exchange rate). Of course, that varies - those prices are from around 15 acre lots to 160 acre small farms, and it totally depends on location, type of land, how improved it is, whether there are any structures on it (those prices are for land only, but may have a shed or a an old shack or something, no houses). Unfortunately because it's so dry here (compared to the UK) you can't have the same number of animals per acre as you might do over there - the pasture just can't sustain it. Again, depending on where/what/how, you'd expect to have at least half the stocking rates of UK farms here (this is total guess work but from my meagre research, it seems about right). That said, we have a hell of a lot more space.


As one more comparison - I do marketing for a couple of residential land developments on the urban fringe around melbourne, where the prices can range from $200,000 (about 130,000 pounds) for a 320 square metre block of land, up to about $900,000 for a 900 square metre block. We only sell really high-end stuff, and so these prices tend to be top-of-the-range, but then the land is pretty special (for residential, suburban land), so it all works out. If you know what you're doing, you get what you pay for.

[mab]

Buy if you can afford it - They are not making it anymore!

That still doesnt make it a worthwhile investment, does it?

i would buy land if i could.

Me too - it's like Mission Impossible trying to rent land for pigs (even cute, wee, furry ones    )

Ditto - The way I see it is that word population is higher than ever before and still going up and people, on average, are getting weathier (in china & india for eg) and wanting more food per person.

Even with GMO's there is a limit to the amount of food that can be produced / acre so productive farmland almost has to be going up in value.

I think this Is why i'm now on 30 acres and living in a static caravan 

[Simple Simon]

Intuitively land values have to rise because increasing population puts more demands on a static quantity of the stuff whether for housing or for food.


Practically though, the returns made by farmers can't pay the rents that big values should attract.  The fact is that institutional investors don't know one end of a cow from the other. 


Alice, when I was in Sydney in 2007 farmland out to the west around Richmond had become insanely expensive because it was being bought up by people wanting polo grounds.  I'd never seen fencing of such quality and in such quantity anywhere before.  However by 2008 when I last went the same land was all back on the market at any price as the property guys, particularly Centro, hit rocks.  I guess the happy man would be the farmer who sold high and bought back low.


in really bad times land allows you to grow food and survive.  But don't forget the three basic asset classes need for survival are
1 food, or a means of production such as land
2 a means of exchange (gold or suchlike, so you can buy foods you can't produce or tools)
3 the means to keep hold of 1 above
which in shorthand are known as Canned Food, Cash and Cartridges

[deepinthewoods]

2 of them i can do!