Curiously, the real estate lobby will not acknowledge the existence of real estate bubbles until after they have burst.  It employs the “shortage of land” argument, often also adopted by economists, to explain rapidly-escalating land prices.  Rarely is the more obvious case put that land prices are simply high because of inadequate public capture of site rents – or that land prices represent the private capitalisation of land rent remaining uncaptured by governments.  – Bryan Kavanagh