02-04-2023, 09:52 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Canada
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Medieval real estate?
hi
so i see in low tech companion 3, a way to price out houses, which is fricken awesome, but as a person who lives near a major city, I assume that real estate can be a bigger proportion of the cost of buying a place than the actual building cost. I may be wrong, as there was less density back then, but i am wondering does anyone know of any supplements that address the cost of buying a house ina crowded city, where land is actually valuable? thank you. Oliver.
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Oliver. |
02-05-2023, 12:05 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: Medieval real estate?
What time period? In a medieval feudal society you couldn't buy a house in a city. The Crown owned everything and you paid rent. This never changed until cities started getting charters.
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Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting. |
02-05-2023, 12:35 AM | #3 |
Stick in the Mud
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Rural Utah
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Re: Medieval real estate?
And to make it more confusing, didn't they sometimes sell the right to collect rents for different parts of a house to different people? So you might pay land rent to Lord so and so, and the building rent to duke what'shisname, etc.?
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MIB #1457 |
02-05-2023, 03:05 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
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Re: Medieval real estate?
Yep. Instead of selling the property, the Lord would sell the license to collect rent.
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Compact Castles gives the gamer an instant portfolio of genuine, real-world castle floorplans to use in any historical, low-tech, or fantasy game setting. Last edited by DanHoward; 02-05-2023 at 03:10 AM. |
02-05-2023, 03:34 AM | #5 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: Medieval real estate?
Quote:
While the details varied based on the terms of the contract, functionally it's no different than leasing a property where you have rights to rights to build on the land. If you're willing to use real estate prices in late medieval England as a guidelines, you're in luck. There's a downloadable database here. |
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02-05-2023, 08:14 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Canada
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Re: Medieval real estate?
Lets assume a charter city.
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Oliver. |
02-05-2023, 08:33 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Medieval real estate?
My fantasy campaign, ended about a year ago, was Bronze Age rather than medieval, but some of the principles might apply.
People in low-tech societies spend the great majority of their income on buying food and/or of their work on producing it; 75-80% isn't unusual. The budgets I've seen for low-tech household expenditures tend not to mention housing costs, but I've assumed that housing is a small share of total expenditure. For my campaign, I assumed that an average city dweller had $600 a month as their cost of living, but that housing was over and above that, and came to 5% or $30 a month or $360 a year. You can turn that into an asset price by dividing by the interest rate. Around 20% seems plausible for the high-risk environment of a premodern city, which gave me $1800 for a house. That may not seem like much, but remember that this has no plumbing, no electricity, heating only from a fireplace, no glazing, and generally none of the amenities we take for granted, and can probably be put together fairly quickly. Bear in mind that this is a gamable abstraction, not a historical model. Evaluating the purchasing power of money in past centuries is half guesswork anyway at best.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
02-05-2023, 09:13 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Medieval real estate?
Quote:
Although when the Crown comes into it, as I understand it "freehold" land in the UK is still only Fee Simple from the Crown. |
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02-05-2023, 09:16 AM | #9 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ronkonkoma, NY
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Re: Medieval real estate?
The answers are given above: in most of the European Medieval period, people didn't own land; they were granted it by a lord — ultimately going back to the king — or they rented it.
But is your game set in a setting based on real history? Or is it your own fantasy setting somewhere other than Earth? You're not bound to use the rules of real history in your setting. Maybe you can buy real estate in your world. I don't believe GURPS has any real estate price rules, so if you want to include it in your non-historical setting, you'll have to decide on prices for yourself, there being no historical prices to use as a model. |
02-05-2023, 10:17 AM | #10 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Pioneer Valley
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Re: Medieval real estate?
And while building construction prices are relatively static, land prices are all over the place. It's not going to cost you all that much more to have a three-bedroom house built in Manhattan than in East Buttcheek, SK, but the price of the land per square foot'll be what, a hundred times more?
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