If the answer is ‘no’ in both cases, how can we speculate on the price?
Answer to what? I honestly don’t understand the nature of your objection. The stipulation is that she is willing to sell and has the authority to do so. I’m not asking you to guess what price she might add above intrinsic FMV. As I said, it may not even matter.
Ignoring away the refusal to sell doesn’t automatically generate an asking price; that’s all.
glee’s point doesn’t address that the fire damage was not to the entire castle, and did not tuch the Norman keep nor the St Georges Chapel, nor did it effect the stonework of the main walls. Also most of the artwork and removeable objects were saved from the fire. So the 38 million only refers to the replacement of antique structural/decorative parts and facia with modern high quality reproductions. The real cost of the original antique building must be at least 10 times that value (a reproduction is always much cheaper than an original). I wouldn’t be too surprised if the arms collection couldn’t make close to 100,000,000 itself, how much for an original set of Henry the 8ths personal Armour?
Well, at least for the art and historical artifacts we can get some sort of estimate, because similar things do come up for auction occasionally.
But the castle itself is absolutely unique, so there’s no way to estimate a good price. And the stipulation that the queen, or parliament, or whoever has the authority to sell is “willing to sell” isn’t quite clear.
Pretty much anything, even a unique father’s day gift made by a child, could be sold for some amount of money. Are you going to hang onto that handmade ashtray from 3rd grade if you were offered enough money to send the child herself to a top university? Obviously the selling price isn’t the same as the “replacement value”, since there’s no way to replace that thing she made 10 years ago. And the selling price is going to be different for different people, even assuming equal levels of attachment. Bill Gates isn’t going to be moved by an offer of ONE MILLION DOLLARS for his child’s ashtray, but most people would.
So calling the queen a “willing seller” misses the point. The value of the castle is precisely what she is willing to sell it for and you are willing to buy it for, if the price you’re willing to buy it for is higher than the price she’s willing to sell it for, the transaction goes through and everyone is happy. But if we stipulate that she’s willing to sell, then the offer could be one dollar and she’d accept…she’s willing to sell after all. The other way to look at “willing to sell” is that she puts the castle up for auction, maybe with some minimum price. But that just asks, how much is the highest bidder willing to pay? How much do you have?
Realistically, there’s probably no individual on earth who could afford to buy the castle, even Bill Gates, since while he might be “worth” billions he’d have to liquidate his stock in Microsoft to get the cash, and liquidating that much stock would collapse the stock price. He’s worth 30 billion only if you multiply today’s share price by his total number of shares. But if he tried to sell those shares he wouldn’t be able to get today’s stock price, but some lower price.
So one answer to your question might be: As much as the richest man in the world would be able to liquidate without destroying his personal fortune. In that case, it probably couldn’t be sold for more than a billion dollars, no one on earth has more liquid assets than that. Or maybe my estimates are wrong. Or maybe Bill is willing to destroy Microsoft just to get a nice castle.
Actually, it’s not that easy. I remeber having read an article long ago, estimating the price of copies of several major monuments. Amongst them, Versailles, and I assume the same general problem would be true for Windsor.
The price mentionned (and I don’t remember how much it was) was for a replica in concrete, and they mentionned that no estimation could be given for a true replica (in stone, with hand-made statues, etc…) simply because it was impossible to build such a thing nowadays plainly by lack of qualified workers (stonemasons, gilders, etc…). Such people are very rare now, and mostly working precisely on monuments. So, if you intended to rebuild a true replica of a palace, you would first had to train workers by the thousands (or alternatively, I suppose, create a new “castle building” industry, design machines that currently do not exist specifically for this task, etc…).
If what you two are saying were true, then the auditors could not have put together financial statements for the Crown Estates linked by GorillaMan. And yet, they did — including balance sheets with evaluations for both real property and art. The only problem is that the art (antiques and paintings) is valued at 5 billion pounds altogether, and isn’t split out the way the properties are. All that is necessary to know at this point is what is the Windsor portion of the 5 billion.
Lib, reading that report, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include Windsor Castle. It doesn’t say so exactly but it does list the highlights of the Windsor estate that are included and would seem pretty anomalous to mention golf courses but not a castle. In fact, if you look through the report, none of Queenie’s homes are mentioned: there’s no mention of Buck Palace either. Probably because they are her private property, as opposed to the crown estate or something like that.
So that GBP154m is just for the parkland near the castle.
Perhapse Liberal could explain how we could put a selling price on Mount Rushmore, or the White House. A similar technique could then be used to put a price on Windsor Castle. Even then it would be very questionable as what meaning such a price had, and whether it was more acurate than any other number we could imagine. Seriously Windsor Castle could be bought if UK was in significant financial trouble and no other alternatives presented themselves, or if the payment was sufficient to hugely advance UK’s political position as a world power. Also it may be sellable by the monarchy with sufficient legal work if they needed the money or were peacably removed from power. Whether such a price would be related to the property value is still doubtful, it would be related to how much the government wished to give for the property (buying it from ex-royalty) or how much the government would require in financial insentives in order to sell it to a foreign interest.
Actually, the constrast doesn’t hold. You seem to be assuming instantiation in the latter, but uniqueness in the former. Windsor Castle is not just the sum of land, architecture, ornamentation but also prestige, history & other special qualities. To know how much Windsor Castle would fetch, you have to ask those selling it, failing which, attempt to analyse the psychology of those who can. In which case, you can speculate on the former, as well.
This is the point I have been trying and apparently failing to make; Willy Wonka says of the squirrel - “It’s not for sale; she can’t have it”; we cannot force an asking price from his lips simply by saying “Yes, but how much would you want if she could have it?”.
We can speculate on reasonable values for trained squirrels, but there’s no way to calculate the cost of one of Mr Wonka’s trained squirrels, not even by hypothesising his willingness; his price for one of his trained squirrels is undefined.
You’ve never heard of a mortgage?
I disagree, Mange.
Things are accurately valued by valuers absent any intention or desire by the seller to sell all the time. Houses, cars, whatever. They are valued on the basis of what the market would bear, if the seller did wish to sell.
With respect, you are confusing asking price with market value.
Further, if a “willing seller” will not take what the market will pay, they are not a willing seller. A willing seller is, by definition, a seller who is prepared to take what the market will pay.
My house is not for sale. But I suppose if someone offered me $2m for it, I’d take it. So I suppose that is my asking price. However, that is not its market value because I am not a willing seller. I do not want to sell my house. If I was a “willing seller” I’d would, by definition, be someone who is prepared to take what the market would bear in order to sell my house.
However, that doesn’t mean that the market value of my house is “undefined” (although it’s not precisely defined). By comparison to other sales of similar houses in the same area, we can say that market value would be around (say) $200,000 because that is what buyers would pay to get my house, and what I would have to accept if I was actually willing to sell.
So in my view the sticking point here is not the lack of a willing seller. That is a given in Lib’s hypothetical which we can work around. It’s the lack of comparatives to allow us to determine what the market would bear.
The problem is that Windsor Castle is an item where the price could be incalculable due to its historical associations. Princhester, if your house was the house where, for example, John F. Kennedy was born, then there would be no way to calculate its value by comparing it to similar houses in the neighbourhood, or even to the sale price of other presidential houses. It would depend on so many variables (How popular is President Kennedy right now? How many other artifacts related to him are available? Are there two Kennedy enthusiasts in a bidding war?) that there is no way to come up with a price until it is sold.
For example, any painting that has hung in Windsor Castle will have an (undeterminate) added value just because it was hung in there, in the same way that a dress owned by Marilyn Monroe is worth much more than the same used dress owned by Mrs. Smith of Peoria.
(sorry, hit “submit” too soon)
An analogy I would choose is - what if the Louvre decided to sell the Mona Lisa? You could look at its insured price, but what relation would that have to how much it would fetch at auction?
Trying to determine the selling price of Windsor Castle, especially including all of its contents, would be an exercise in futility.
And they generally perform this example by comparison; it doesn’t matter that Fred Smith isn’t willing to sell his two-up-two-down terraced house, because there are others almost identical in the same street and nearby; notional valuation can be performed independently of his willingness to sell, because the item isn’t unique.
However, if Fred Smith flatly refuses to sell, then a valuation of his house, to a person desirous of buying his specific house, is meaningless
I agree; if there were another Willy Wonka, willing to sell his trained squirrels, a notion of the price of the first Wonka’s squirrels, were he willing to sell, could be extimated, but it is undefined because there is no similar example by which it could be defined.
So I guess that more or less puts us on the same page; how about this; willingness to sell is not an important criterion in the valuation of objects which are merely one of many similar objects… Yay! we agree…
But…
This is the Queen of England’s house! - something for which there is no comparison object by a very wide margin; in this case, and particularly as it’s the property of the Crown, the price shall be whatever Her Royal Majesty deems appropriate; hypothetically pretending that she may be willing to sell lends us no insight whatever as to the price; it might be one penny (if her willingness to sell is a symptom of insanity, it might be ten billion pounds if some dire defence-of-the-realm type emergency arose and could be resolved for that sum, or it might be five billion,billion pounds if she just wants to test the market.
Sorry if I’m being obtuse about this.
Arnold, we are in furious agreement. Check out my earlier posts, and indeed the last sentence of my last post.
Mangetout, before we go any further, let’s be clear about what we are discussing. I think I may see where we are thinking about this issue differently.
Lib in his OP says “what would it cost me…” assuming that Lib has “unlimited funds”.
You seem to be reading that as suggesting that Lib will pay whatever Queenie asks (after all, he has unlimited funds). I agree with you that looking at the problem that way, the question is meaningless because Queenie has a veto and she can just sell for whatever she asks, and we don’t know what she’d ask.
However, I am assuming, from the fact that Lib’s OP takes it as read that the Queen is willing to sell, that what Lib is talking about is really better phrased as “what would the market value be?”
If that’s right then read on and, as you say, we are in agreement up to the point where you say “But…”
My emphasis. This is not a correct statement as regards market value because it does not take into account that it’s not just a matter of what the seller will take, it’s also a matter of what buyers will pay.
She can ask what she likes, but if it’s beyond what available buyers will pay, she won’t sell.
The only way you can estimate where buyer and seller will meet in relation to any given object (absent an actual sale) is by comparatives. That is what is lacking in this instance.
The Queen’s unwillingness is not the unique feature. If I don’t want to sell my house, hypothetically pretending that I want to sell lends us no insight whatsoever into the price it would take to buy my house off me, because I am unwilling to sell.
In either case (Windsor castle or my house), the only way to circumvent the seller’s unwillingness is by finding comparatives of actual sales (where the seller was willing). The difficulty with Windsor Castle is that there are none.
“…impossible to answer” “…just unanswerable”
Watch in amazement as the great “mr real time” answers the unanswerable question with:
Offer them 3 trillion, I guarantee Windsor Castle is yours, and they will throw in the Queen as a bonus.
(that is approximately US$50,000 for every man, woman, and child in Great Britain).
apologies for the last post, the man from mrrealtime corp who posted that last comment has been sacked.
A special thanks to Princhester for framing the question properly. I can see how my own awkward phrasing might have confused people. With respect to the Crown Estates report, it does indeed mention the Windsor castle property by name, and values it at 154 million. You might have seen that it was excluded from the rural properties, but failed to see that it has its own section. (See page 30.)