Urban land speculation; failure of land market

This article is intended to examine the nature of urban expansion and development from a land speculation and urban sprawl perspective. Survey and case study approach were used to achieve this aim. As urban territory extends into adjacent periurban areas, speculators keep their land out of the current market so that developers of land and buildings must bypass it and home buyers should travel further distance to buy new lands and houses. This extra distance creates additional costs by increasing the cost of development, operation and travel. The finding of this article concludes that the speculators who held their land out off the market and received an average land value increase of about $230 per m2 each year generated extra social costs which they did not pay about $1,810 per m2 each year.