When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
That is an insane assertion, does your house stand on a cloud without plumbing or electricity? Some places require a plan for water and septic on your land before they'll even approve a house.
Realistically, I would not have been able to own my car, which is rapidly depreciating to nothing, without my land on which to park it. Are you suggesting that I should start telling people that my car is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'm quite sure I'll get a lot of funny looks, and probably some angered questions from my financial associates, if I heed your advice, even if it is actually true under some sort of accounting methodology.
You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.
You don't seem to understand how land works in the US. Owning land is more like a license to do certain things in a certain place. Part of that is the license and infrastructure that forms a house. Land is part of the house.
Your argument is totally disingenuous and pedantic, you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath the footing and make this argument. In your car analogy, a house without a deed is like a car without a title, you don't own it in any useful sense.
> you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath
If the agreement includes the land, septic system, etc., then sure, absolutely. Likewise, I could also sell my car with the driveway it is currently sitting on, given a willing buyer, and it would equally be fraud if I ripped up the driveway. Lawyers can draft up all kinds of different agreements as far as your imagination, and another willing party, can take you.
But it is not unheard of to sell a house alone. Granted, houses are becoming massive – with the average home today being twice the size of the average home in the 1950s – which makes them harder to load onto a trailer, let alone fit down the road, and thus seeing less and less of it, but it was somewhat common in the past to move a house (and I don't mean a mobile home) from one property to another. They are clearly distinct things.
But, most importantly, the context of discussion explicitly removed land from the equation. It was posed under a theoretical assumption that there were no land constraints. To keep talking about the land in that context doesn't make any sense.
Moving the shell of a house in my county is illegal without waste treatment, which is part of the house permit that forms the legal entity of a house. And I live in about the most deregulated county in the lower 49.
You could theoretically buy a shell of a house in a vacuum but it would be condemned the second it drops off a trailer. It's not useful in a vacuum, no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
> no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
Nobody is talking about housing prices, so... They are pointlessly squabbling over whether or not a house and land are the same thing, when it is obvious that they are not.
>>I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction
>Nobody is talking about housing prices
Actually we were?
Nobody but you thought land and a house is the same thing. House prices include the land they are on. Unless you are living on the space station or sea steading, the land and infrastructure is part of housing prices.
I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
We were earlier talking about the cost to build a house. I suppose that is close enough to satisfy your historical observation, but we also moved on from that a long time ago.
> House prices include the land they are on.
It was recognized that we are in different jurisdictions, so maybe things are different where you are, but around here you effectively need to own the land[1] before building the house. How, exactly, can the price include something that doesn't even exist at the time of the land purchase?
Perhaps you are suggesting that once the house is standing and all the bills are paid one might sum it all up and say that is what it cost to get them into a house? Perhaps, but the prices (e.g. the price of the land and the price of the contractor) will still have been observed independently.
> I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
I have no idea how you think someone could take offence to a comment on the internet. It is an emotionless venue.
[1] It is not entirely unheard of to build a house on someone else's (e.g. a family member) land, but in that case it is even clearer that the price of the house is not included in the price of the land.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
And this is all before you even break ground.