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Some emerging island economies have been fostering foreign direct investments in the real estate market. Given the rise in real estate demand under such contexts, this must have entailed a rise in land demand, and subsequently, land prices could have been affected. This study assesses if the rise in land demand caused by domestic and/or foreign land demand has been influencing residential land prices in Mauritius. To undertake the research, annual data was collected from the year 2000 to 2019 and a structural time series approach was used. It was found that unobserved components, namely the trend level and slope, as well as the cycles were significant in explaining land prices. It was concluded that fluctuations in land prices are significantly explained through latent variables, such as regulations in the land market, fiscal policies concerning mortgage loans, and speculative land buying among others. It was also found that foreign real estate investment (FREI) used as a measure of foreign land demand did not significantly influence land prices. To further probe the factors affecting land prices in Mauritius, domestic demand-side factors were considered and it was found that income, population, unemployment, and real construction costs were significant in explaining land prices.

This paper studies the extent to which equilibrium land auction prices are pushed up sequentially due to strategic bidding behaviors in government land auction sales. Using a unique dataset that covers the universe of tendering prices submitted by all developers for all residential land auction sales in Singapore, we find that a tenderer’s bids are significantly higher where there was a previous land parcel sold within two years and located within four kilometers. The identified price margin decreases with time and geographic distance. Tracking sequential bids submitted by the same developer over time, we find that the incumbent winner of a previous auction is more likely to participate in subsequent nearby land sales as compared to the second-highest bidder of the same auction. However, it does not necessarily win the subsequent sites. We argue that the incumbent deliberately bids up the subsequent land prices to gain pricing advantages to their own parcels.

Japan has the world’s largest old population ratio; thus, aging is an urgent societal issue. As global trends seem to be following Japan’s social changes, there is an emphasis on municipalities becoming more age-friendly. Hence, we examine the age-friendliness of 135 Japanese municipalities, selecting 240 resident architectural designers and constructors to assess their municipalities using the Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ). The findings indicate that Japan lacks “outdoor spaces and buildings”. Additionally, the evaluation of “housing”, “community support and health services”, and “transportation” in populated municipalities in the past five years was found to be significantly higher than that in depopulated ones. Age-friendliness is significantly affected by the AFCCQ total score (hereafter, Score) based on “housing”, “social participation”, “community support and health services”, “transportation”, and “financial situation” evaluations. High specificity (0.939) was found when the score was treated as a marker of depopulation; an age-friendly approach is a necessary condition for preventing depopulation. Furthermore, a lack of “communication and information” was observed in municipalities with a higher rate of single-person households aged 65 years and older. Therefore, resident architectural designers’ and constructors’ assessments, combined with the AFCCQ, will be a powerful tool for evaluating the age-friendliness of municipalities.

Auctions are used by local Chinese governments to raise revenue while releasing land for development. Because developers reveal their valuation of parcels through winning, bids for land use rights in subsequent auctions may be influenced by outcomes of earlier government sales. A log linear hedonic regression analysis of more than 900 residential land use rights auctions in Chengdu over eight years reveals that top developers' winning bids signal other developers who adjust their bids in subsequent auctions. Developers appear to believe that the top companies possess superior knowledge through research, experience, or insider information. The results are higher government revenue and rising land prices, which can lead to lessened competition among housing developers, higher house prices, and affordability problems in neighbourhoods where the top developers buy land.

This article hypothesises that, due to factors such as thin trading and lack of publicly available data on transactions in the land market, urban land prices react more sluggishly to shocks in market fundamentals than housing prices do. Based on a vector error-correction model utilising quarterly data for the Helsinki Metropolitan Area in Finland over 1988Q1—2008Q2, the empirical analysis provides support for this hypothesis. In particular, the results suggest that new information regarding the market fundamentals is more rapidly reflected in housing prices than in land prices. Nevertheless, it is the housing price level, instead of land prices, that adjusts towards a cointegrating long-run equilibrium between housing prices, land prices and construction costs.

This research deals with the problem of agricultural land market efficiency using the spatial market integration concept as well as the present value (PV) model. Empirically, it aims to test the convergence of agricultural land prices across Polish provinces. In order to check the law of one price (LOP), good-quality, medium-quality and bad-quality land sales markets are examined separately. Furthermore, this study is complemented by an analysis of the drivers behind agricultural land price convergence. The main method of testing price convergence is the log t regression. The latter was performed in two configurations, i.e., based on trend components of time series extracted using the Hodrick–Prescott filter and the Hamilton filter. Additionally, traditional β- and σ-convergence tests were applied. The obtained results indicated that agricultural land prices tend to converge in relative terms, which means that the provinces share a common long-run growth path. This finding and estimates of traditional convergence tests prove the increasing integration in the agricultural land market in Poland. There is no evidence, however, to support the conclusion that the absolute version of the long-run LOP holds. Moreover, using dynamic fixed effects models, it was identified that for good-, medium- and bad-quality land prices almost the same drivers of convergence apply. The only differences concern the strength of the influence of independent variables on prices of farmland of various types. Additionally, bad-quality land prices are the only ones which are affected by livestock density. Furthermore, estimates of the present value model finally confirmed that the agricultural land sales market in Poland cannot be considered as efficient.

An in-depth exploration of the inner mechanisms of the spatio-temporal evolution of land prices in multiple industries (residential, commercial service and industrial) is of great significance for improving the overall economic development efficiency and resource allocation capacity of the region. Based on urban land price transaction data provided by the China Land Market Network, 307 county-level units in the Yangtze River Delta were used as the study area and spatial auto-correlation and spatio-temporal hotspot analysis were used to explore the spatial variation and temporal changes of land prices in multiple industries in the Yangtze River Delta from 2008 to 2018. The three-dimensional driving theory of land “demand + supply + market” was used as the basis to construct the index system of influential factors and the Spatial Durbin Model was used to explore the mechanism of the spatio-temporal variation of land prices in multiple industries. The results show that the land prices of multiple industries in the Yangtze River Delta are generally high in the east and low in the west and high in the south and low in the north, which is spatially consistent with the level of regional economic development. Due to the disparity in economic development between the regions, factors such as population, capital, technology and information are redistributed and fed into each other’s cycles between cities. The resulting spatial differences in land market supply and demand are intrinsic to the spatial differentiation of urban land prices. It is further proposed that land prices are a monetized expression of the abundance of resources in a city and that land prices are determined by the combined ability of regional resource factors to be allocated. Thus, land price differentiation reflects differences in the level of comprehensive regional development. Finally, the dynamic interaction of various factors on land values is used to promote the division of urban functions and regional economic development, which is an effective way to promote high-quality integrated regional development.

This article investigates the recent changes of agricultural land prices in Lithuania and quantitively assesses the most important factors affecting it. Land is one of the main scarce resources and it distinguishes itself among others by the inelasticity of price change to quantity, meaning that the changes in land prices are affected by demand and in very limited extend by supply. Taking this into account, it is important – from the practical as well as the theoretical points of view – to know these factors and, if needed, take regulatory measures. As the case of Lithuania suggests, the recent rapid growth of land prices is mainly driven by general economic performance (GDP), EU and national financial support provided to the Lithuanian agriculture sector and the regulation of agriculture food prices (the setting of purchase prices).

This paper analyses firms’ bidding behavior in auctions for development land in Hong Kong. The real estate market in Hong Kong is considered to be oligopolistic as it is dominated by a few top real estate firms, which have strong financial strength/development capacity and large land banks. Joint bidding is used by other real estate firms (“large” firms) to pool resources/capital in order to compete with the top firms. We test whether joint bidding increases or decreases the level of competition in land auctions, using land auction data in Hong Kong from 1991 to 2011. We find that large real estate firms are more likely to be successful than top firms at auctions when bidding jointly. However, joint bidding/winning does not harm competition as reflected by the number of bids, bids per bidder and number of bidders. Land prices also increase significantly in auctions won by joint bidders or alliances of large developers. Our results suggest that joint bidding enhances competition by allowing large firms to act strategically by pooling their resources and act aggressively to compete with the top firms.

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French house and land price data. After handling a number of estimation concerns, we find that the elasticity of urban costs increases with city population with an estimate of about 0.03 for an urban area with 100,000 inhabitants to 0.08 for an urban area of the size of Paris. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as the share of housing in expenditure, the elasticity of unit house and land prices with respect to city population, and within-city distance gradients for house and land prices.