Friday 12 February 2016

Maths news: a small number times a big number is an even bigger number*

From The Mirror:

Arsenal fans left fuming after Stan Kroenke buys this mega 535,000-acre Texas ranch for £500 million

£500 million is of course a huge amount of money, but at less than £1,000 an acre, it was a fraction of the price of farm land in the UK.

The land for a typical, average English house has a selling price of about £100,000, which is £1 million per acre. Paying that much is extravagant!

* Assuming the small number is greater than 1 etc.

3 comments:

Bayard said...

Mark, are you not guilty of a diagonal comparison? Should you not be comparing farmland in the UK (and the poorest quality farmland at that) with farmland in the US? This: http://content.knightfrank.com/research/443/documents/en/h1-2015-3007.pdf tells me that you can buy hill farmland in Scotland, probably of a similar quality to the land in Texas, for £732 an acre.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I am comparing farmland with farmland. Read the article. If you look at the pictures, some of the land on that ranch is pasture and some is arable. For sure, you can buy some land in the UK for less than £1,000/acre, but arable land is much more expensive (goes up to £10,000).

Either way, his land cost 1/1000 as much as average UK residential land.

Bayard said...

Ok, 30,000 acres of cultivated land @ say, £6,000/acre (average arable)= £180M. However much of the rest looks like desert so is probably worth a lot less than that. The lowest value I've been able to find in the UK is for "plantable" land at £500/acre, which, if the desert is worth anything like that, which I doubt, gives UK values for the remaining land as £250M, total UK value of land = £430M, leaving £70M for all the various houses on the ranch, which sounds like a fair price to me.

"Either way, his land cost 1/1000 as much as average UK residential land."

Er, maybe because very little of it is residential land? I can't see how this isn't comparing apples with oranges.

13 February 2016 at 17:44