LAND VALUES

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 50, 28 February 1930, Page 12

LAND VALUES

NEW ZEALAND AND HOJIE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 16t.1i January.

A comparison of laud .prices' in England and iv New Zealand is a subject dealt with in the "Spectator." The writer of tlio "Country Life" notes has hoard of a young settler who has bought a farm of some 200 acres iv the North Island of the Dominion. "The land has cost him just over £30 an acre; and he regards the price as moderate. It is unfenced internally and partly unfencod externally. It has no housel. .. . .

"The production of the farm," continues the writer, "will in part be marketed twelve thousand, miles away. Contrast with this a recent experience in England, one of many. A small farm, of fairly good soil, equipped with a house, situated within thirty miles of London, failed to fetch £27 an acre. To give a previously quoted example, an estate within sixty miles of London, containing farm houses and cottages, accommodating a population of about one hundred and thirty persons, good farm buildings and roughly two thousand acres of land, is valued at £6000 or less—a smaller sum than the two hundred acres of unfenced land in New Zealand. Can it really be true that land' close to London is worth less than a tenth—a good deal less if the houses be reckoned—of the price of land in New Zealand1? ,_ "To discover what is the'cause'and what the cure of such a condition would appear to bo one of the most stringent of national obligations. Perhaps Lord Bledisloe will explain the contrast when he Las had sufficient experience of our antipodes, the land that is most widely removed in dis-. tance and the nearest in affection?"