Thursday, July 5, 2007

investing in land

Since the day of the gold rush, investing in land has been a lucrative business. Putting money into land is one of those investing basics. It costs very little to do, it is easy to tell when it will turn a profit for you, and the profit that it turns will be large. I'm not saying that investment in land can not backfire. Housing values do go down from time to time, and whole areas can fall apart due to urban blight or natural disasters. Nonetheless, even modest investing in land can yield dramatic gains.

One of the great things about investing in land is that there is a limited supply. Land will always be valuable, and as the world population grows, it will become more valuable than ever. A lot of investing in land is done as a form of real estate investing. People sit on a plot of land and wait until a developer wants to buy it. Then they sell it at top dollar. I had an uncle who did just that. He made a killing off of investing in land. He bought a stretch of riverfront property in a blighted industrial area. People thought that he was crazy. Even though the property was cheap, no one could see it ever being useful for anything. In 10 years, however, he proved them wrong. The city hired a developer to use the land for real estate. The money that he made off of it made him rich.

Of course, you should not just go out and buy any land for sale. If you want to invest in real estate, there are often better ways to do it. Investing in land, after all, is a gamble. The reason my uncle's plan works so well is that no one else wanted to do it. It was a risky investment. That is why investing in real estate can often be a much sure thing. It can be comparably easy to buy up existing housing, improve it, and sell it off. Although it requires more work, you're almost guaranteed to make money at it.

The bottom line is that, whether you are investing in commercial property or in land, you stand to make a lot of money. It is not very hard to research the way the market is going. If an area stands to grow and is not too inflated already, investing in land is one of the best ways to make money off of the inevitable economic progress.

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