Medieval real estate?

[cupbearer]

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.

[DanHoward]

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.

[sjard]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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.

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.?

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by sjard

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.?

Yep. Instead of selling the property, the Lord would sell the license to collect rent.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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.

On the other hand, it was often possible to get a very long term rental agreements where you and your heirs agreed to pay "ground rent" or "chief rent" to whoever owned the property (the king or local bishop, usually) for a set amount of time. 99 years was the longest lease period traditionally allowed under English Common Law.

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.

[cupbearer]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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.

Lets assume a charter city.

[whswhs]

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.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

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.

Presumably you could also hold a feudal tenure in an unchartered town? Presumably not a military foedus, but some kind of other service in return for land?

Although when the Crown comes into it, as I understand it "freehold" land in the UK is still only Fee Simple from the Crown.

[Stormcrow]

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.

[RGTraynor]

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?