Land banking is the practice of purchasing raw land with the intent to hold on to it until such a time as it is profitable to sell. Land is popular as an investment as it is a tangible asset as opposed to shares or bonds.
The intended increase in value may come from inflation, conversion for use as housing, or potential for extraction of raw materials.
Typically parcels of land desirable for land banking are those that lie directly in the growth path of rapidly developing cities. The initial goal is to buy undeveloped land that will increase in value because it lies in the path of urban growth. The investment objective is to identify these parcels well in advance of the developers and wait for the value to be realised.
Read more about Land Banking: Agricultural Land Banking
Famous quotes containing the words land and/or banking:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One of the reforms to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change in our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)