Similarly of many of the r_an_ches bought at five dollars an acre by
Americans and resold as r_awn_ches at twenty-five dollars to forty
dollars to Englishmen. If the Englishmen will be satisfied with two
and three per cent., where the American demands and makes twelve to
twenty per cent.--the investment may make satisfactory returns; but it
is hard to conceive of enormous tracts two and three hundred miles from
a railroad bought for fruit lands at twenty-five dollars an acre.
Fruit without a market is worse than waste. It is loss. When
questioned, these English investors explain how raw fruit lands that
sold at twenty-five dollars an acre a few years ago in the United
States to-day sell for five hundred dollars and one thousand dollars an
acre. The point they miss is--that these top values are the result of
exceptional conditions; of millionaires turning a region into a
playground as in the walnut and citrus groves of California; or of
nearness to market and water transportation; or of peculiarly finely
organized marketing unions. If the rich estates of England like to
take these risks, it is their affair; but they must not blame Canada if
their investment does not give them the same returns as more careful
buying gives the Canadian and American.
Not all investments are of this extravagant character. Hundreds of
thousands of acres and city properties untold have been bought by
English investors who will multiply their capital a hundredfold in ten
years. I know properties bought along the lines of the new railroads
for a few hundred dollars that have resold at twenty thousand and
thirty thousand and fifty thousand. It is such profits as these that
lure to wrong investment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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