Nonsense. The middle men are part of the economy of real estate. Building, selling, reselling, tenanting… These are all economic activities with associated costs. These costs are higher where you are working within an existing cities where there are already people, property owners, residents, communities, local governments.

So, yes building in the middle of nowhere reduces your costs. Mostly because land is cheap, but also other reasons. The thing is, those reasons are both cause an effect of the higher value of those houses. people will pay through the nose to live in a roach infested box in central London, Manhattan & San Francisco fro precisely those reasons. These places have people, jobs, vibrancy and the tangle of all these that makes it very to build on a large scale but give these places an unmistakably organic feel.