Scaling behavior in land markets

We present power law statistics on land markets, which no other studies have so far done. We analyze a database of the assessed value of land that is officially monitored and is made public by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Government of Japan. This is the largest database of Japan’s land prices consisting of approximately 30,000 points for each year of a 6-year period (1995-2000)[25]. By analyzing the data of the posted land price we found the power law distributions of the land prices and of the relative prices of the land. The data fits to a very good degree of approximation the power law distributions. We also found that the price fluctuations are amplified with the level of the price. These results hold for the data for each of the 6 annual intervals. Our empirical findings give the conditions that any empirically accurate theories of land market have to satisfy.