Sort of. In a lot of areas, the cost of the house has skyrocketed in the last few decades. One factor is that you can’t buy an empty lot and then build a 20 year old $250k house on it in most markets. If you want to build a house, that house will be new (obviously — relocating an old house is a real pain), and the costs of construction are silly. This effect inflates the value of old houses in a lot of markets.

Of course, in markets that don’t have plenty of inventory of both empty lots and lots with old houses, it can be hard to value the house by itself.

> relocating an old house is a real pain

Has relocating an old house even been done? (Assuming the house wasn't built to be movable.)

Somewhat recently in SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/23/san-francisc...

Yeah, it's a thing for a certain type of historic building.

See https://patch.com/massachusetts/lexington/historic-house-mov... as an example

It is done, albeit rarely due to how expensive and complex an operation it is. My friend's mother moved her house a few kilometers across some farmland. It was a rather large 2 story tall house, with a basement. It had to be moved to a plot that had a similar foundation and basement prepared for it.

As the other comments note, yep, it's been done.

It seems there's a whole spectrum from lifting houses to put a new first floor below them, to moving them a bit, to moving them several blocks in a city. (to big building projects too, historically)

I saw a house in progress being moved, 30 years ago. Great thing to take a kid to see!

Is there really a meaningful difference when you’re not able to buy one without buying the other?

Maybe - we’re trying to sell a deceased family member’s block of land that might be worth more in the market if we demoed the building because it’s unliveable.

While I agree with your point about land, Im not so sure it is true about the house, given changing costs of labor, code compliance, and materials.

It's not even really the land, it's the cuts + certificate of occupancy which have both been made artificially harder to get for a number of reasons.