1.12.6 Land and buildings

A character may own property, i.e. land and/or buildings.

Land

Characters may own large areas of land, either by purchasing them or by being given them on account of their status in society.Alternatively, characters may rent smaller areas of land from the land-owner.

The value of land depends on:

• the size of the piece of land;
• the type of land;
• its location;
• its current usage;
• the extent to which the land-owner can exert his/her rights over the land.

Land areas are measured in hectares. A hectare is an area equivalent to 100 metres times 100 metres. One hectare is roughly equivalent to 2.5 acres. A square kilometre is equivalent to 100 hectares.

For agricultural purposes, the size of a typical holding of good farmland would be approximately 4 hectares per farm labourer who works on it.

The typical value of land (per 4 hectare plot) is shown in the table below:

* Note that plots of land in cities or towns are normally significantly smaller than a hectare. For a typical house, a plot of land might be 1/25 hectare.

The value of any buildings on the land needs to be calculated separately.

All rents are stated gross, i.e. before the administrative costs of collecting the rents; the net income that a land-owner would typically receive after paying for adminstration would be roughly half the gross rent.

Buildings

As well as the land, a character can own or rent buildings on the land.

The value of a building depends on:

• its size. This is measured as floorspace area in square metres. To help assess this, a typical room in a house is roughly 10-15 square metres in size, so houses will vary from small cottages of 50 square metres to a town house of 150 sqaure metres to a mansion of 500 or more square metres;
• its type of construction. This gives a rough cost per square metre as follows:

• its location. This applies a multiplier to the cost of the building as follows:

For example, Rupert, a merchant, has come into a significant amount of money. He wants to buy a house in the rich merchant's quarter in town. The house is set in a walled garden measuring roughly 40 metres by 50 metres (one-fifth of a hectare), and is made of stone and is two storeys with approximately 200 square metres floorspace on each storey (400 square metres in total). For the land, he should expect to have to pay roughly 4,000s (20,000s x 1/5), plus for the building roughly 8,000s (100s x 8 x 10), making a total cost of 12,000s = £600 = 30 GT (equivalent to a modern figure of US$ 1.5 million). His maintenance bill for the house will be roughly 160s (20s x 8) per annum (equivalent to a modern figure of US$ 19,200 per annum).

For example, Rupert, also wishes to buy a country estate, located close to the town and tenanted with farmers. The estate comprises 200 hectares of good farmland (enough to support the resident population of about 50 farm labourers), plus a further 100 hectares of forest. On the estate are 25 small wood cottages (each roughly 50 square metres floorspace) to house the labourers, plus a brick manor house of roughly 500 square metres in size. For the farmland, he should expect to pay roughly 20,000s (100s x 200), plus for the forest a further 1,000s (10s x 100), making 21,000s total for the land. For the cottages, he should expect to pay 2,500s (25s x 4 x 25) and for the manor house a further 2,000s (50s x 4 x 10), making 4,500s for the buildings. So, the total value of the estate is roughly 25,500s = £1,275 = 63.75 GT (equivalent to a modern figure of US$ 3.188 million). His gross rental income from the farms will amount to roughly 200s per month (equivalent to a modern figure of US$ 25,000 per month). His buildings maintenance will amount to roughly 400s (10s x 25 + 15s x 10) per annum (equivalent to a modern figure of US $ 50,000 per annum).