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Originally posted by Zeromaru X

If you have access to Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion, the topic is explained there. IIRC, you need a lot of permissions from various Guilds to get a property.

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Here's a rough guess, and individual DMs can adjust as desired to fit the monetary standards of their own games. The prices immediately below are those for living space, not businesses. Yes, few of the city's current natives could afford to buy new buildings (or even old buildings) had they not been purchased ages ago and kept in the family, only having to worry about taxes. This is one of the main reasons why Waterdeep gets rebuilt exactly as before whenever tragedy strikes--no one is willing to give up the prime real estate except those who can afford to buy better...

Class D Buildings: 1,000 gp per 18' square lot/building site + 750 gp/floor of building built (new) or 500 gp/floor when purchasing a building.

Class C: 2,000 gp per 30' square lot/site + 1,500 gp/floor (new) or 1,000 gp/floor.

Class B: 4,000 gp per 30' square lot/site + 2,400 gp/floor (new) or 2,000 gp/floor.

Class A: 10,000 gp per 50' square lot/site + 7,500 gp/floor (new) or 5,000 gp/floor.

These ratings are also adjusted by any changes or additions made to the Representative Floor Plans in City of Splendors, any expensive materials used, etc. For these, add trade charges for the labor (see Guild prices on Building and Stone). If the building has a business or trade use, fees come from the respective guilds (about 5% of lot costs + guild membership fees) and the City (an additional 2% based off lot costs), payable at the Palace.

All of these fees come together and are finally adjusted by their placement.

Dock Ward No change to price
South Ward +2% to total price
Trades Ward +5% to total price
Castle Ward +10% to total price if south of the Castle
Castle Ward +20% if north of the Castle
North Ward +25% to total price
Sea Ward +40% to total price

If any side of the building is......

On a main avenue (pavement): +25% to total price after ward adjustment
On a secondary avenue (cobblestones): +10% to total price after ward adjustment
On a lesser avenue (corduroy/logs): +5% to total price after ward adjustment
On a minor avenue (dirt road): No change to price

Yes, this makes real estate in Waterdeep horrendously expensive, but that's life in the biggest city in the North and one of Toril's greatest cities ever.....

Steven Schend
FR Senior Designer

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Originally posted by Renin

That's certainly getting out of Dodge; running Phlan to Waterdeep!

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Originally posted by Dalor Darden
Which led to yet another question: should I even bother to find out? I mean, how much would it change the game to have to keep track of that kind of wealth?

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Originally posted by Dalor Darden
Gold is not looking like a good medium of exchange in Faerun.

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Originally posted by AJA

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Originally posted by Dalor Darden
Which led to yet another question: should I even bother to find out? I mean, how much would it change the game to have to keep track of that kind of wealth?

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Should you bother? I'd say no; the generic D&D economy breaks even harder at higher levels than it does at lower. For something as abstract/astronomical as that the easiest answer is just "as much / as little as you need them to for the purposes of the story you're trying to tell." All noble lords take their morning swim in Scrooge McDuck-style coin-pools, except for the one who just hired the PCs to go and retrieve [plot macguffin] from [dungeon or ruin] because his House is in sudden dire financial straits.

It would also be impossible to codify as anything other than a momentary snapshot in time, as coinage is constantly moving, in and out of trade, real estate deals, and swapped around for high-ticket items like magic and quarter-million-gold-piece gemstones.



But if you do still want to try to nail down the numbers (both liquid and otherwise), here are two passages that illustrate the sheer absurdity you'd be dealing with;

First, in Ed's replies on becoming nobility in Waterdeep here at Candlekeep and also printed in Power of Faerūn ("Becoming Noble In Waterdeep," under "Achieving Nobility") the examples he gives of the Phull and Zulpair families include "entire caverns full of already-mined rubies" and "they bought up nigh all of North Ward between them – and then gave it away, property by property" (I'm not going to count how many buildings are in "nigh all of North Ward" and then attempt to multiply that by Steven's numbers above, but I'm pretty sure it would come out to quite an astronomical amount).

And then there's Ed's short story "Nothing But Trouble" in Dragon Magazine #238, where it is said that House Brossfeather owes Mirt the Moneylender "rather more gold pieces than what Waterdhavian nobles called a 'thousand thousand.'"

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Originally posted by Dalor Darden
Gold is not looking like a good medium of exchange in Faerun.

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Well, when you get to those heights, gold is not the medium of exchange; things like gems, magic, property, deeds of nobility and first-born virgin daughters/sons all take precedence.

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Originally posted by maransreth


OK, the file our DM provided us with is the aforementioned "Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion".

Sarteck - thank you for the info. Our Dm charged us 3gp/month for property tax. Either in the pdf above or made up. I think it is poor that if a manor is provided, there is no additional info on additional costs. Yet again another WotC decision to leave it up to the DM to figure out.

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@twitcher1979
Is there an Income Tax in Waterdeep? If so, or even if not, what is a good average for such a thing? Thank you in advance for your time and for sharing your work with us all.


@TheEdVerse
Waterdeep's annual taxes (as opposed to fees, like the docking fees for ships, and annual business license fees): citizens belonging to guilds pay dues to the guild (and the guilds then pay a smaller "head tax" based on number of members to the Palace [city]), and there are realty taxes (in the past, the hated window tax [covered in a Wizards website online column that should still be up on the archive], and more recently a variable-amount tax based on how large your building is; landlords pay this (so renters pay indirectly, through their rents), but there's no income tax. (It IS better to live in the Realms rather than the real world! Yes, YES! ;} ). Avoiding charging income taxes is how busy mercantile trading centers avoid declining when nearby centers rise.
#Realmslore

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