Diego Velazquez' Mercury and Argus

Thursday, 5 July 2012

A Grand Rural Estate

If you are 51 like me, you might have  fantasies, too, about the family fortune (big or small)  lasting over generations or better centuries. My thoughts inevitably turn to the old (noble) families (I am western European, German) with their grand rural estates. For me there is no other asset class that stands that much for continuity over centuries, for defining a family, for anchoring a family.
And we perceive it as cool. Just look at the various clothing labels, how they play with the landed gentry lifestyle, to sell us their coats and jackets, from Barbour to Ralph Lauren to I don't know what.

Now what is interesting, farmland is quite a rational asset class. It is a play of palpable asset vs paper asset, a play of limited supply (global fertile land) to rising demand (of food).
If you have 3 or 4 million US$ to spare, think of it.
Starting from US$3m in South America, US$5m in North America or Eastern Europe, there are some properties in the market that would be both a reasonable farm investment and a cool rural lifestyle investment.
Only downside being that farmland prices rose quite a bit globally over the last couple of years.

historic Estancia in Uruguay











you got them in the US, too, where not gone with the wind

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