The author previously did a great blog post breaking down the overall costs of building new homes: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so

The author previously did a great blog post breaking down the overall costs of building new homes: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so-expensive https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so... tl;dr: For new developments, land is only about 20% of the total sale price of the home, and this share has been dropping since 2005. However, he also notes an important selection bias to this stat: new homes do not get constructed in areas where land is expensive, unless it's a custom build for a specific wealthy buyer, because developers cannot make a profit building SFHs if they spend a majority of the purchase price just buying the land. He notes that in wealthy areas like eg. Silicon Valley, 80% of the purchase price is land value, but developers are not building homes there, which is part of why the purchase price is so high. And sure enough, if you go out to Mountain House or Discovery Bay, prices are like 25% of what they are in Silicon Valley. But then you have to commute from Mountain House. America's housing problem is as much a commuting or job distribution problem as housing, but those problems are even harder to fix than housing.