Land Investments
Land investments are significantly different from stock market investments in several very important aspects.
- In order to purchase $50,000 worth of stock, you usually have to put up $50,000 in cash. Yet a person can often purchase $50,000 worth of land by making a down payment of only 20% ($10,000) and financing the balance.
- A stock investor’s percentage of ownership in a public company can be diluted if the Board of Directors elects to issue more shares of stock. Conversely, a land investor retains 100% ownership of the land.
- Stock owners are subject to the quality of the management running the company: good management can result in a higher stock price, and poor management can cause a stock price to sink. Landowners are not at the mercy of management (since there is none)—they simply wait and rely on time (or some other positive development) to increase values.
- During the last 100 years, quite a few large, prominent Wall Street companies “crashed” and went out of business. However, every single acre of land is still here today and is worth more money than it was 100 years ago.
Historically people have made huge sums of money with both stocks and land. People have also lost large sums of money with both stocks and land. The glaring difference, however, is that if a land investor can afford to hold onto a piece of land for a long enough period of time, then the value, at some point in the future, will always be higher than the original value. But that luxury doesn’t exist with stock in a company that went bankrupt and was liquidated.
Land investments are one of the very few assets guaranteed to still be here in the future, and one that is assured to eventually have a higher value.