Could farmland be the next real estate bubble? Want to get a second home that is not only in the country, it IS the country? Like The Bridges of Madison County country? Buy a farm in Iowa. No kidding: Iowa farmland rose in value by 13 percent in the year ending Oct. 1, according to a report in the DesMoinesRegister. Why? Because the value of the commodities on the land shot up — if the stuff you are growing is making more money, then the land you are growing it on becomes more valuable.
Stimulated by rising commodities prices, Iowa farm values rose by 6 percent in the period from July to October. That’s because corn prices shot up from $3.50 to more than $5 per bushel, and soybeans climbed from $9 to $13 per bushel.
Last September, the Iowa Realtor s Land Institute said values of Iowa farms had risen 8.5 percent from the previous September to a statewide average of $4,518 per acre.
I love the beach, I love San Diego, I love Alys Beach, but I could totally dig a farm in Iowa for double digits.
The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago said: “I see the value of farmland (going up) and people looking to deploy lots of liquidity, looking for opportunities. I see that prices are rising above what the productive capacity of that land can support.”
So here’s a nice 217 acres with a very new ranch house, only $675,000. Comes with rolling topography, workshop and livestock.
<a href="http://www.agphd.com/"><b>Brian Hefty</b></a> tells us cropland values are at an all-time historical peak of the sort that precedes a collapse. For the investor desperately seeking to park his money under some ROI mattress, any ROI mattress, cropland probably represents the reverse tossup to gold. Why not just put in a nice truck garden next to the cement pond instead.
Kind of like Florida in 2005/2006?
In hindsight, it sounds like it.
It also appears that while I was vicariously snapping up my last 100 acres of prime soybean ground I left more than one space before href in the link above, making more work for everyone who would try to follow it.
Not a problem. Appreciate the correction!
And I still want to play Meryl Streep!
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