15 - The real estate market

Summary

The number of inhabitants here has increased all too much so that the [already] high price of property has gone up.

- Gerichtsprotocoll (1751)

It might be argued that a truly kin-controlled land system would be one in which land never comes onto the market. Commercialization of property might then be considered one indicator of a move away from ascribed relationships to ones of convenience and mutual advantage. Simply to measure an increasing commercialization of land – the amount coming onto the market, its price, and its rate of turnover – would be a first step in showing the rate at which it lost its capacity to integrate family interests. An increase in the amount of land bought and sold and in the volume of transactions, a decline in barter, a decrease in the average-size plot, a rise in the average price, an increase in the formality of transaction, and a decline in encumbrances on property – each of these things would seem to describe separately sufficiently but together overwhelmingly the rate at which property holding was divorced from family considerations. They might even be taken as a measure of the trajectory of individualism. A further step in the analysis would be to trace the relationships between buyers and sellers to see if kin sold to one another and to what kind of kin. Whatever results might be found would not, however, be lacking in ambiguity. Suppose that in a period of low market turnover of land people did not sell to kin, but under opposite conditions did.