Such contracts require builders to pay only a small fraction of the total lot costs up front, and they tend to have few (if any) performance requirements. These kinds of contracts are often renewable, generally expire on a rolling basis, and have a specified exercise price. During the housing downturn that began in 2006 and continued into 2009, many large homebuilders terminated their land option contracts, thereby losing their cash deposits. Their assumption is that demand in the housing market will not rebound for some time and that they will be able to repurchase land at much lower prices as the economy emerges from recession. Because the decision whether or not to acquire land is the single most important decision a builder makes, considerable effort is made in this endeavor. Land acquisition experts typically scout the market for recent sales of new homes in search of “comparable” properties.
These comparable properties provide the basis for a detailed analysis aimed at determining an estimate of the selling price for homes being considered for construction. Based on a list of no fewer than 20 items, the company contrasts the comparable home’s features to the typical home that it would build, assigning dollar values to the units’ differences. These differences, which try to approximate the value that buyers place on certain features (for example, lot lines and design), are summed and netted against the sales price of the comparable home, in order to arrive at a hypothetical sales price for the builder’s proposed units.
该合同要求制造商支付只有一小部分的总成本，他们很少有（如果有的话）的性能要求。这类合约往往是可再生的，一般到期的基础上滚动，和有一个指定的行使价。在房地产低迷的2006开始，一直持续到2009，许多大型房屋建筑商终止他们的土地期权合约，从而失去他们的现金存款。他们的假设是，在房地产市场的需求不会反弹了一段时间，使他们能以很低的价格回购土地作为经济走出衰退。因为决定是否购买土地是最重要的决策者，在这方面取得了相当大的努力。土地收购专家通常侦察市场最近的新屋销售搜索“媲美”的性质。
这可比的性能进行了详细的分析的目的是确定的家庭正在考虑建设的估计售价提供依据。基于一个不少于20项列表，公司可比的特征对比国内典型的家，它将建立，估值的单位的差异。这些差异，尝试近似的买家在一定的特征值（例如，很多线条设计），归纳和网状对类似的国内销售价格，以到达船厂提出一个假设的销售价格单位。
