The prices of residential land in German counties

Abstract

Abstract We estimate changes in the value and price of residential land for 379 German counties (“Landkreise”) from 2014 to 2018 using a total of 42,647 observations. In doing so, we build a database for the cost of housing structures and residential land values at the county-level. We use the two-step residual method that decomposes the value of a home into its structure cost and land value. Despite the short time series, we show that the price of residential land has increased significantly more than the structure costs and house prices in most of the German counties. Specifically, the average land values increased by 27%, while the average structure and home values increased only by 14% and 20%, respectively. Our findings thus imply that cycles in the German land values are more likely to affect the evolution of house prices in the future. Furthermore, we show that our estimated land prices vary significantly to the current land price valuation in two of the German federal states (Hessen and Thuringen).