"Buy Land They Quit Making It!" ~ Mark Twain

A simple quote from one of my favorite authors.  A simple quote, yet one that speaks volumes.  On the surface it sounds funny and makes you laugh like many of his quotes and sayings.  However, once one thinks about it, it makes perfect sense.  

The question is, what makes something valuable?  Money is valuable.  But too much of it makes it worthless.  Gold is valuable.  But if things really go south it just becomes a paper weight.  Homes are valuable.  But eventually they suffer depreciation.  

Think about it like this.  As a young boy growing up just outside Detroit, MI, I love collecting baseball cards.  I even had a book that would tell me how much each card was worth.  I had varying degrees of cards worth varying degrees of money but never amounting to much.  One thing I did know, and anyone who collected baseball cards knows, the most valuable card was a Honus Wagner card.  

Why is his card so valuable?  After all, he was a good play but not great.  He was no Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb or Mickey Mantle.  What was it that made Honus Wagner's baseball card so valuable?  The scarcity of it. 

Which brings me back to Mark Twain's quote.  There is no new land being created.  Unless you're counting the south east coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.  But that land won't be useful in our life time and for many generations to come.  The fact that the land we have is the land we get is why prices for land will always go up.  Yes from time to time land will take a dip.  But it takes a major international event to make that happen.  I will go into more detail on that in a post later.  But to give you an idea of what I mean, land prices didn't go down during the Great Depression.  That's right.  It stayed the same but never dropped.

So when I hear someone say, "Land is going for more now than it ever did before!"  I'll say, yeah that's true.  And that saying will be true tomorrow because land will be going for more tomorrow than it did today.

To give you a good and final idea of what I'm getting at I'll leave you with a quote from Cropland Investment LLC.  "Like buying gold if it paid a dividend."