I'm not going to call your expertise as a lender into question, and I definitely agree that land price increases have outrun incomes in the last few years. The southern Iowa hunting land market in particular feels like a bubble that is being mostly propped up right now still by a small segment of the market that are major big cash buyer investors, combined with still very low inventory. However, I also feel compelled to note once more that the ISU land values survey data is a countywide average. If we're talking about hunting land, and we're talking about an Iowa county that has tillable land (as every county in Iowa does), then the ISU survey "average" number is not the average for what hunting/combo land sold for in that county in 2023. Looking at the bottom 2 tiers of counties in south central Iowa, the 2023 ISU countywide average numbers are almost all $1-2k/acre above what the average hunting/combo land was going for in those counties. 2022 avg numbers are way above what hunting/combo land was going for too. Higher $ tillable land sales in those counties were dragging the average up to a higher number. The most interesting data to me was the % increase in the avg from 2022 to 2023. By an overwhelming margin, the highest percentage increases in the avg. sale value number from 2022 to 2023 were in counties south of I-80, east of the I-35 corridor, with a number of southern Iowa counties having more than a 10% increase between 2022 and 2023.
