LAND LESSONS – You Can’t Get There from Here
You can’t get there from here.
For the last twenty-seven years that I have been a land broker, I have invited my friends who are division presidents or land acquisition managers for home builders to break bread with me – one-on-one – during the first weeks of January. I truly enjoy these meals, when we can relax and chat about the holidays just past, over heaps of French toast or slabs of ribs and talk friend to friend about life, love, death, taxes and of course, land.
Sometime during that meal, I will inquire about – the MEMO.
Today, with our world of endless Zoom calls, it probably isn’t really even a memo anymore, the way it used to be. Whether via email or Zoom comes corporate marching orders from someone a thousand miles from here telling that person in charge of land and lot acquisition that they expect them this year to put a thousand, twelve hundred or even fifteen hundred lots under contract for delivery within the next twenty-four months.
That’s the memo. Go buy lots.
What they don’t understand from their corner office in Miami, Atlanta, Dallas or Denver is that we in Maryland have been developing land and building houses for the last three hundred and ninety years. Since English settlers led by Leonard Calvert landed on Saint Clements Island aboard the Ark and Dove in February 1634, we’ve been looking to find land and once cleared, build houses.
In Maryland, the population of the first European settlers was just 583 people in 1640. In 1650, Maryland’s population was 14,037. Fifty years later in 1700, the population had grown to 29,604. A hundred years – 1734 – from that initial landing, our state’s population was 91,113. By 1770, our population was calculated at 202,599. By 1870 – 236 years after the first Europeans had settled in Maryland, our population had grown to 780,000 people. With the influx of immigrants from Europe our population exceeded 1,188,044 by the 1900 census.
With the baby boom of 1950 we were 2,343,001 as development expanded into Montgomery and Prince George’s County. By 1970, our growth was 3,923,897. In 1990 with expansion throughout Harford and Howard Counties the census showed 4,780,753 which grew to 5,296,486 by 2000. Today, with growth into Frederick, Washington and Cecil Counties our population is over 6,177,224.
Over the last twenty years local government has been implementing anti-growth legislation. This combined with the reality that most of the land that can be developed into lots has been in the counties that have the necessary infrastructure to support development means it is incredibly challenging for the ten national/regional builders to buy all the lots as directed by that memo. You can’t get there from here.
