Finance and Economics Discussion Series

Commercial and Residential Land Prices Across the United States

Joseph B. Nichols, Stephen D. Oliner, and Michael R. Mulhall
2010-16

Abstract: We use a national dataset of land sales to construct land price indexes for 23 MSAs in the United States and for the aggregate of those MSAs. We construct the price indexes by estimating hedonic regressions with a large sample of land transactions dating back to the mid-1990s. The regressions feature a flexible method of controlling for spatial price patterns within an MSA. The resulting price indexes show a dramatic increase in both commercial and residential land prices over several years prior to their peak in 2006-07 and a steep descent since then. These fluctuations in land prices are considerably larger than those in well-known indexes of commercial real estate and house prices. Because those existing indexes price a bundle of land and structures, this comparison implies that land prices have been more volatile than structures prices over this period.

Keywords: Price index, land, residential, commercial