Understanding the costs and benefits of land development: An empirical analysis into the financial effects of location features

Abstract

As a means to sustainable urban development, redeveloping brownfield sites is advocated over greenfield development in most Western countries. There is much case study research into the factors that influence the (financial) costs, revenues and results of land development. What is virtually absent in the literature is large-scale quantitative research, in which costs and revenues of land development are systematically related to location features. This paper reports on the results of such a research project in the Netherlands in which multivariate regression analyses have been carried out to estimate the relative value of these location features to the costs and revenues of land development. The research shows that much of the financial variance can be explained by basic location features. Especially previous land use (brownfield versus greenfield) and the fragmentation of land ownership seem to play a key role in understanding the financial structure of land development.