Real Estate Mania Spreading

A common refrain among the pro-real estate crowd goes something like this: Well you can always live on land, unlike a share of stock in CMGI.  There are several fallacies with logic like this that aren't worth getting into, but the argument is especially hollow when the real estate is barely livable. 

That's what's going now as investors are scooping up property on the misearble Texas Bad Lands:

For 19 miles, most of it bumpy enough to shake your bones, State Route 2017 runs down to the Rio Grande and the Mexican border.

Drug smugglers and illegal immigrants pass through here. So do the Border Patrol agents that pursue them, and cowboys heading to a nearby ranch. No one else bothers. The land is sandy and bleak, full of gullies and rattlesnakes.

Yet this parched ground is increasing in value faster than any Manhattan duplex or Malibu villa.

In February, a California entrepreneur bought 7,408 acres for $65 an acre. He promptly sold them in small chunks to some people and in big chunks to others. Some of these buyers quickly resold to others, who resold to still others.

The pieces keep shrinking while the price keeps going up. Buyers are now paying as much as $800 an acre, 12 times the cost six months ago.

At the county clerk's office in Fort Davis, the county seat, they long ago lost track of how many new landowners Valentine has. They definitely dwarf the hamlet's population of 217. The best guess is a thousand.

There are thousands of other new owners all over sparsely populated West Texas. Nearly all the sales are for raw, undeveloped land, bought over the Internet or at seminars in distant cities.

The whole article is a must-read.  People are buying property and they don't even have a photo.  This is the Florida real estate bubble all over again.

More:

The most worrisome prospect: The buyers think someone's going to live here, despite the absence of water, electricity, sewers, roads and other amenities.

"You could live there in a tent, if you could find your land," said Jeff Davis County Clerk Sue Blackley. "But you'd have to helicopter everything in."

None of the locals seem to think the land is a good investment, no matter how rapidly it has been appreciating. Sure, it was smart 20 years ago to buy desert land near such boomtowns as Phoenix or Tucson. And most of Jeff Davis County is quite pleasant, so much so that it's being touted as a retirement center.

But the fact that this land is being sold off piecemeal probably guarantees that it will never have electric power or streets. Developers want to work with large tracts they control, not hundreds of small plots whose owners are unlikely to agree on what improvements they will pay for.

I find this almost hard to believe.
(Found via Calculated Risk)

Comments

[Ed]

Interesting, and probably a good indication.

Of course, a California speculator had to start this...

Combination of the fact that land really is cheaper in Texas (for good reasons), dovetailing with the ignorance of an average investor...

"Many other speculators have followed in his wake. On Bid4assets.com, a seller offered up last month a "huge" 10-acre Hudspeth ranch, touting it as "a great investment property."
"There is wide-open space and room to grow whatever your desire," exclaimed the seller, identified only by the nickname "JackieO." "Only in Hudspeth, Texas you'll find the beauty and splendor of high desert living!"

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