Land is an opportunity
Global urban land values continue to skyrocket. In the United States alone, the total value of urban land averaged $25 trillion between 2005 to 2010, twice the value of the country’s gross domestic product. In San Francisco, the land value per acre averages $3.2 million, a staggering amount given the city sits on only 49 square miles. As a highly urbanized city, San Francisco is estimated to have an average land value of $3.2 million per acre. Population growth, economic booms, lucrative companies, affluence, and simple geographic constraints, for most cities, serve as the key ingredients for soaring land values.
Land is a constraint
While values soar, urban land remains difficult to utilize due to complexity. Negotiating relationships with external influences – neighbors and regulatory agencies – could prove difficult when investing in an asset. Abutting physical constraints also become major factors when programming for assets to have an outsized impact. Calls for more resilient infrastructure and development have taken hold in major cities as checks that affect land use patterns. In the Bay Area, for example, chronic inundation and aging infrastructure prompted a rewriting of land use policy to meet more sustainable goals.
This presents several challenges to landowners. How landowners make decisions alongside physical and political constraints without restricting real opportunities becomes a question for them.
At MKThink, we partner with clients to balance these two perspectives.
As increasing values and growing constraints become inescapable trends, we help answer how our clients may optimize asset utilization while ensuring fulfillment of their mission. One of our primary focuses is to integrate macroeconomics, business processes, city policies, and organizational changes with the physical environment to create lasting value.
Our approach
MKThink integrates research, analysis, planning, design, and technical skills to address the complexity of land and to provide creative solutions for the clients to preserve values of their assets. Instead of approaching land management problem as a binary – commerce on one side and conservation on the other – we advance the solution by deploying a systems-based approach to strategically balance any use and development of the land. Furthermore, we emphasize comprehensive and adaptable process that covers a wide range of topics in early planning, which contributes to higher accountabilities later.
Read more about MKThink’s work with Real Estate Strategies here