It's been seven short days since the last newsletter, and inevitably, another week has passed. This week has been an interesting one. In this episode we'll cover some tools I've built which can be used for monitoring land prices , some rationale for why this is even useful, plus some other thoughts about business, employment, and goal setting.
If you're reading this then it's very likely that you know me personally, and if you know me personally then you'll also know that I've historically been strongly against land ownership (from a personal finance perspective), instead advocating for broadly diversified global equities (a'la MSCI World Index ). None of this is financial advice, this is just my personal thoughts . Whilst I maintain the belief that this is probably the best option for the majority of people (and that renting is indeed worthwhile for the flexibility it provides*), there comes a point where sustainability in the truest sense of the word is only possible through long term residence on a reasonable amount of land. Here I'm talking about food sustainability, environmental sustainability, energy self-sufficiency, and everything else associated with more sustainable living. After all, sustainability in the economic sense is possible with enough money invested to sustain one's lifestyle without depleting the principal amount, but at what cost...
So, without sounding like a drooling eco-crusader, I think it's probably a good idea if more people were able to live more sustainably in whichever way sustainability sounds best for them . And don't worry, I appreciate the irony that this is coming from someone who's spent years working in both a hedge fund and an oil company.
Anyway, as you might have anticipated, even the possibility of living more sustainably is predicated on the ability to find somewhere where you can grow things, and build energy, water, and climate (HVAC) infrastructure. The obvious candidate for this kind of project is a piece of land, and with the state of the British economy as it is, ownership of any reasonable parcel of land (say one hectare, or 10,000m 2 +), is not possible without significant investment. Significant here is on the order of £10/m 2 , so for one hectare this is £100,000 at an absolute (unrealistic) minimum, with things like access, planning and zoning laws, taxes, and things like that roughly quadrupling the cost for the mission of 'buy land and build something sustainable'. Taking over an existing smallholding is also a viable option, but much like in software engineering, sometimes nothing is better than something.
Side note: I found this site with a rough quote of over half a million for a hectare of land for housing development in my old home of Hull - pretty steep, but the chip spice might be worth it.
The only option then is going offshore, and while land in the Cayman Islands is just a shade more expensive (!), I am fortunate enough to enjoy the post-Brexit luxuries of a Dutch passport. As a Dutch national, I am therefore able to buy land and live freely anywhere in Europe, which is pretty cool. And of course with that flexibility comes a need for actionable intelligence around land prices, rules, regulations, and exchange rates.
Which brings us to the (currently unpublished) land price aggregator, which pulls in a number of different datasources to plot land for sale across Europe (currently only Spain and Italy). If you read the last episode about the importance of the creative moment , it's clear that I need to combine this with some other dataset and interactivity to make it actually useful. I've therefore also collected data around average yearly rainfall, solar radiation, and that kind of thing across Europe.
The end goal here is being best informed to make the decision of where one might pursue true sustainability, without having to sell a kidney. On top of plotting this on a map, I've set up alerts which email me every mid-morning with the latest listings and opportunities. As a subscriber of this newsletter, if this is something you'd be interested in, please let me know by text/linkedin/email at ojs@ojsgroup.net and I'll add you to this morning email (100% free).
As you know the goal now is to primarily to build a business, but I feel like living more sustainably is a worthwhile secondary pursuit. I'm telling you this not to try and convert you in any way, in fact I know that some of you reading this are committed consumerists and I respect that, but to warm you to the idea of a (very) slow drift towards that kind of writing ( in addition to business learnings and updates ). Maybe 12 months from now one of these episodes will be about programming a crop monitoring system, or pitching a new breed of jalapeño. Whichever direction it takes, I hope to see you in the next episode, which will be about balancing over-engineering with delivering something useful while building a tech startup, plus some very rough thoughts about long-term business planning and how that's shaping what I'm working on.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Oliver
*Happy to discuss this after no less than 3 pints.
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