A History of Site Valuation Rules: Functions and Empirical Evidence

It is commonplace to think of the price of land as an amount per unit of area. This may be inappropriate, because it appears that the value of land increases at a decreasing rate as area increases in some situations, and frontage and depth may affect value differently. Various rules have been developed to aid in the process of estimating site value. This paper describes the functional forms of these rules and provides estimates of the parameters of these rules utilizing historical data. The hypotheses that value is a concave function of both frontage and depth cannot be rejected.