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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9285, 12 February 1889, Page 4

Time was when landed property was considered to be the most stable form of investment. No matter what changes occurred, short of earthquake and volcanic eruption, the land remained in statu quo, and those who had sunk their money there, regarded their security as something like being as unshakeable as the foundations of the earth itself. In the colonies, of course, the theory has been rudely shaken long ago, but there is a sort of lingering feeling that this is of the evils inherent to the topsyturvey and transition state of all things colonial ; and landowners,- and investors in such property, are sometimes disposed to sigh over the thought of the stability that attaches to the value of landed estate in old and settled communities. But from incidents that are coming to light it would appear that it is not in the colonies alone that disappointment comes to those who have built their hopes on real estate; and those staid old men of property in England and Scotland who are supposed to never blunder in their calculations, appear to be now-a-days just as liable as we are ourselves to burn their fingers with real estate. The editor of Truth has been at the pains of hunting up a few of the illustrations of the remarkable depreciation in the value of land at home, and he tells us some of the results. An estate belonging to a Mr. Greenway, a banker of Warwick, which had cost £25,000, was put to auction at Birmingham, and the highest offer received was £7850. In Scotland, again, the small estate of Woodmiln, near Dunfermline, which had cost in 1874 the sum of £5500, and to which had been subsequently added improvements to the cost of £500, making £6000 in all, was sold in October of 1888 for the sum of £3000. Again, the estate of Inchmartthine in Perthshire, which was valued in 1873 at £140,000, was sold in 1888 for the sum of £60,500. In the annual rentals of farms there has been a similar fall; and the instance is given by Truth of the Lawes estate, one of the largest farms in Perthshire, which for many years was let at £1550 a year, but has now been let for £850. As we understand that the Ellerslie Syndicate's land, which was sold for £16,000, may now be had from the mortgagees for something about £7000, it will be seen that the new and the old countries are not so dissimilar in the collapse which has taken place in landed securities. We are sometimes disposed to throw stones at those who have been so foolish as to attach a value to lands in the colony, which has not stood the test of time, but it would appear from this that the staid and unimpulsive representatives of property and capital in the mother country are not exempt from errors of prescience and of judgment as to the value of landed estate.