Comment by andrewla
1 day ago
Now we're wandering a bit far afield, but estimates and measurements like this are fine if they are designed for an operational purpose. If I want to know the unimproved value of my land so that I can evaluate whether to buy a similar property and build a similar house on it, then it's fine for me to use whatever estimation protocol is going to help me make a decision. If my protocol is bad then my estimates will be bad then <shrug emoji> it's my problem.
Similarly trying to measure the value of the dollar -- what is the operational purpose of that measurement? This is a real problem in any sort of macroeconomic analysis, and Goodhart's law makes it far far far worse when trying to apply it for practical purposes. Mostly you have to accept that there is not going to be a quantitative metric that captures the underlying squishy concept so better not to think about the problem of, say, inflation, in purely quantitative terms.
No man is an island, unless you're Robinson Crusoe, who was a character in a story.
No parcel of land is an island in this sense, not even an island, because what makes an island is its being independent of a landmass or continental shelf. But in the sense of being moored, all land values are grounded in discrete monetary terms. Even if they are subjectively determined, the land value is an idea space that has limits on what concerns are common, and thus are typically already priced in, and concerns that are less common, and may have already been sold, such as mineral rights.
Unimproved land value is value relative to comparable[0] plots in that same market if possible, because it's meant to be as close to apples-to-apples, all-else-being-equal as it can be. The basis for comparison is whether it's improved or not, as you seem to be specifying, so the relation of land value to improvements seems to be the only independent variable that a potential or actual landowner or anyone else could even manipulate, even in a hypothetical where we aren't bound by real-world factors or limits.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparables