Insurance and Macroeconomics Key Factors
Rent is regarded as a surplus amount paid to the landowner by the user after having deducted the unit costs of optimally employed factors of production involved in using land in its most profitable manner from the MRP generated.
The pattern of urban land use is determined by supply and demand. Classical urban location theory states that on the supply side landowners will seek to maximise land value by allocating land to its optimum use, subject to planning regulation. On the demand side demand for urban land is a demand for space and occupiers or tenants of land pay occupation costs or bid rents that reflect a location’s accessibility. This classical view of the relationship between land use and rent explains whether or not a site is brought into economic use, the intensity of that use and the rent that might be charged. The classical theories also posit that spatial variation in cost and revenue determines the optimum profit maximising location.
An extreme view of the heterogeneity of land is that the supply of each unique parcel of land is perfectly inelastic but of course there will be many plots of land that are substitutable to a greater or lesser extent. When considering urban land, sites in the centre are less substitutable than those on the outskirts simply because there are less of them. Consequently the supply of these sites is more inelastic than others. But these sites are the ones in greatest demand because they are the most accessible to raw materials (labour and capital) and the market (consumers); so their rents are higher and they tend to be intensively developed. This inelastic supply means that economic rent is high in the central area and may even represent 100% of the total rent owing to the inability of supply to increase.