[baltcode]

True, though I'd like to understand it on deeper level. For example, how much of a house or condo price due to the land and how much of it construction, maintenance, taxes?

In any case, at least for building straight up, there is scope for improvement even with the land remaining a bottleneck.

[ghaff]

It varies enormously although there tends to be some correlation between the size and cost level of the house and the price of the land it's on. Someone's probably not going to buy a million dollar parcel of land and put a shack on it (even if they were allowed to by zoning--which they probably wouldn't be).

The general rule of thumb is $100-200 a square foot for houses so a fairly typical 2,000 square foot house is going to probably cost in the neighborhood of $300K to build. That assumes the land has water, electricity, sewer/septic, etc.

So for fairly typical exurb/suburban locations (i.e. not Bay area, Manhattan, or back of beyond), the house and the land are probably roughly the same value.