[snapplebobapple]

Wow, that is a very tortured re-imagining of reality. The buyer in this case needs a certain amount of land at a certain price to make their project make sense. If that amount of land is larger than the average size of land for sale, then they have to leg into the total land purchase by buying chunks of land over time until they have amalgamated their total land requirement. It is entirely the seller's fault because they are the ones demanding a very large markup on the previous fair market value of their land because they know the buyer has already spent millions to hundreds of millions and will potentially lose their shirt if the project fails. This is the textbook definition of market power abuse. The end result of which is an artificial limitation on projects that need more than the average amount of land for sale, less output from society and all of us being poorer for it. Also, you can't really budget for this kind of abuse because the seller is taking into account what they think you budgeted and trying to capture all of it. It's a death spiral for large projects playing that game and it's why some decent secrecy is needed in situations like these. There is no situation where a land owner getting a large payout for holding out is a good thing for society.

[hgs3]

The price of a good is not a constant. It doesn't matter whether it's land, gold, stocks, rent, or trading cards. Prices change. Buyers are never entitled to the "previous fair market value" of anything.