Regardless of what country you're located in, there are a number of constants in real estate since it can't be moved.
1.) The value of real estate and the rights it represents are subject to the support and restrictions meted out by the government. Thus knowing what changes the government intends, or are likely even if they don't intend them, is extremely important. Government action can make a piece of real estate extremely valuable or almost worthless.
2.) Raw real estate by itself is worth very little unless additional amenities can be provided. Without street access, or the legal availability of water and other utilities, real estate can have almost no value.
In a typical home building project project I worked on, the builder purchased the land for $12 million and spent an additional $75 million to put in the roads, sewer, water, gas, and electricity. After this investment was made, they were able to build 4,272 homes on the land. Without the $75 million investment in services, the only use for the $12 million piece of land was raising a few head of cattle due to a lack of water. If the land were sold as farm land, the land value would have been less than $2 million.
The point being that the builder needed to spend six times as much as the land cost in order to be able to build homes on the land. If they just paid for the land, they wouldn't have much.
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