Options To Moniterise A Land Investment
Where once English land ownership was the sole preserve of the Royal Family, the Lords of the Realm and sundry blue-blooded families, at the start of the 21st Century Britons lacking a traceable blood-line are increasingly buying land for either investment or commercial purposes. UK land ownership, whilst still concentrated in a small clique (the upper classes, property developers, farmers etc), is now in the national consciousness and is something to which many people aspire. This is unsurprising: ownership levels of property market assets in the UK have always been relatively high (vis-a-vis other northern European countries), and UK land values have soared in the last twenty years. Buying land in the UK is thus an eminently sensible activity.
With a long-term outlook it is possible to make substantial land investment profits from buying land in the path of growth. Land planning expertise need not be ‘mixed’ with such investment land in order for its value to increase: the returns would be a function of the ‘organic rise’ in the investment land’s value. However this is an extremely speculative form of investing in land, does not usually provide a yield, and as mentioned above is very much long-term in nature.
You may want to buy land in order to run a commercial enterprise: a caravan site for example, or for those with a more belligerent nature, to operate a paint-balling business. Some UK land owners buy land to lease it to firms requiring storage space: new fleets of cars for example. Still others have been buying land in order to exploit loopholes in the Common Agricultural Policy which give rise to EU subsidies for using UK land for farming/agricultural purposes. And finally, and perhaps least ethical of all (but entirely legal), is the practice of buying land which provides essential access to a new development: the owner of such access land can effectively hold the owner of the development land site ‘to ransom’ by demanding an exorbitant price to acquire the access land, which may only be a few square feet in size. Any competent property developer would however avoid such a scenario by ensuring they have full legal access to their development land site, but there remain some people who fall foul of this faintly dubious form of land investment.
Nigel Walter Chairman of Connaught Asset Management
