Buying and Selling Land

Then the first real bid was 46009. The lindens starting price was 13360 proxy or not that is a hell of a first jump dont you think.

Wu you owe me 10 bucks. (see above serious post)

LL starts the bidding at 1L$ a 2m for all L$ parcels auctioned. It will eventually be around 3-10 times that when the auction is finished. This isn't a pitty party where people shouldn't bid.. just to give another person the feeling that they might have a chance at winning.

It makes more sense to wait to bid until about the time the auction closes to see if it's really worth it if you don't have many L$ lying around. On the other hand if you can bid a price so high no one will outbid it.. or you bid what you think its worth to you it makes no difference when you actually bid. In this case, I think we have a person bidding what its worth to them right off the bat... I don't see how it is shocking or outrageous.

I refuse to own land as long as barons exist in SL.
The market is unfair becuase of them.

Furthermore, For Sale signs, no matter how nice they may appear, are a pox upon the landscape, and crowd out creative builds.
Makes me long for 1.2 when land wasn't a comodity.

Why on earth would I want to pay 3-6 times what the land is worth on my FIRST bid. Just because "some" think its worth that doesn't mean I do. This is an artificial market (no pun intended) About worth as much as junk bonds.

Cat

Hugz Ice, I know.

Cat

catherine,
the base price of land is 0.10 USD / m2. please keep that in mind. no market cares what people want to pay. what matters is what are people prepared to pay and what people are prepared to receive. i want everything for free. will you give me your land for free? thanks. set the land to me and send me a LM. thanksbye.

No; no "market", but what are ppl willing to spend for a game? Its all about the money for some. Its all about the fun for others.

Lol I tell ya what I would be happy to give you all my land, but you first

ok but i want 550 000 L$ for all my land. deal?

btw,
you are agreeing with me and describing a market condition.

What? Are you saying people would stop buying land and/or signing up to play SL if you folks disappeared? That you are somehow responsible for the volume of new players (30% increase/month last I heard) being introduced to SL? If so, all I can do is say that is the MOST arrogant, laughable presumption I have had the pleasure of reading in these forums, EVER. If you quit people will still buy the land, they just wont have to pay a middleman.



LMAO! All I can say to that is that it's not even worth arguing with. It's utterly ridiculous BS. Are you paying people's tiers or something? If I am being too harsh here please elaborate further so I can understand this better.

The psychology of auctions can be weird. A strong first bid can be useful to dissuade other potential bidders. If you let someone get started bidding at a low value, they may go pretty high in a bidding war because they get sucked into the competition. If you have enough experience to know a property will go for 4-5x the opening price, placing a first bid of 3x opening is an understandable strategy. I can always backfire though, as others may interpret a high opening bid as a strong commitment to the lot, and screw you by playing against you just because you'll always up your bid to beat them. Yes, I'm an evil bastard sometimes.

lol only if you are paying me 1mil. for mine first.

Janiau; I know what I said. Again I don't see a need for any land market in SL when I can just pay LL for their land. Of course there is a market, an artificialy inflated, over priced, junk bond market.

how is this inflated and overpriced junkbond market? everyone's favorite baronness just posted earlier that anyone who tries to manipulate the land market is DOOMED. do you disagree with her? doesn't that give you comfort that the 5.33, although unpalatable to you, is palatable to the people that matter in any market: the people who meet at the middle to make an exchange. those who bid 1 L$/m2, and those who set thier land for sale for 99999999999 L$ are irrelevant to the market.

LL:
has the idea of expanding the L4L program appealed to you as a way of lowering land prices without regulating the land market?

Jan Jan Jan if you dont know the answers then I over estimated you. Take off the blinders.

Cath

Ergo, do you also refuse to own a house, as long as architects exist in SL?

Or refuse to wear clothes, as long as competent Photoshoppers exist in SL?

After all, the market is unfair.

Not disagreeing, just making a point.

LF

There's a couple differences, Lordfly.
1. Land barons don't create. They are middlemen. There is no added value.
2. Just because you're good at doing something unethical doesn't make it okay.
3. Clothing designers / architects / scripters are not (as of yet) unethical in their practices. The few counterexamples (copyright theives, land scanners) have been ostracized by the rest of the rest of the development community.

Hands Hiro an Asbestos suit.

Our way or the highway, huh Hiro? *repeats after hiro* no added value....




-------
"From time to time, she actually recognizes one of the people who were in her van. But they don't seem to recognize her; they just look right through her. Glassy eyed. Like they've been brainwashed.
Like Y.T. was brainwashed."
- Mr. Stephenson

Please read my post again before commenting in disrespectful way on things I never said. Here my original statement:



If big land owner, such as realtors, stop paying for land, then Linden Labs will have to sell their land before they can start selling new land.

Hmmm there's a thought....

Mmm, I have heared this argument too often now. It is repeated over and over, but that won't make it true either.

To me it only reflect tunnel vision of some who want believe that what they do is more valuable than the type of activity other group do.

Recently I saw a lot of posting about educating newbies about land so they don't need middleman. With this you admit that knowledge and some skills is required for dealing with land. Has it ever come to your mind that there may be people who don't want bother with Land-101 class, with camping auctions, with scouting for bargains, with reading up on land market situation and countless other things? What realtors do is nothing else than save people time and hazzle who don't want bother with this.

It is also a myth that clothing designer, architects or scripters produce any product that is more tangible or less replaceable than land a realtor puts on market. Nobody needs your "product". Why pay 100 L$ for some collection of prims? Prims are free! Paint program like PSP is free! Everybody can learn Texture-101 or Building-101 or Scripting-101. So why pay middleman? Of course there is a reason: because many people don't want bother and appreciate you save them time they would need do it themselves.

The reality of land business, beyond all myth people here try to paint is work, work and work. There is people like me who spend 8 hours and more per day to make it convenient for our customer. The time has long passed where you spend 5 minutes at auction, claim land and simply set for sale with huge profit. Those times existed maybe 6 month ago. But by now we see tough competition and small margin. You no longer make profit if you don't spend a lot of time on:

o Partitioning, reshaping land to the most desired size and terrain on market
o Advertising (meaningful descriptions, screenshots, forum posts etc.)
o Staying in touch with your V.I.P customers
o Offering payment services with at least US$ on PayPal, better also EUR, walking people through GOM/IGE etc
o Discussing with customer the type of land they are seeking and locating most suitable locations for them
o Developing payment plans or complicated swap deals, holding land arrangements etc
o Thoroughly scouting land and currency market every day to know the right price
o Adjusting land price on each parcel whenever L$ or land price change
o Dealing with GOM/IGE yourself to make sure not to waste more money with currency conversion than absolutely necessary
o Scouting land that is for auction, doing thorough appraisal to be able to bid high enough but not too high

This are just some. There is more. Some of us also develop land hiring architect or building themselves etc, such as you can see in Svan or Hanson, rent out land and deal with work associated, but this is more advanced realtor activity that, however, may soon also become essential to keep competitive edge.

So, stating that our product, which is nice land at the right time in the right place at a fair price and all the service associated with scouting, advertising and payment options does not offer value is either narrow minded or arrogant. The answer to the value of our product has already been given by the market. Vast majority of players chose to buy from us instead of bothering with auctions. They value our product and pay our margin because of the time and hassle we safe them. Just same way as they value the builder's product for the time and hassle of creating something themselves, that the builder saved them.

Last not least let us come back to ethics. What is unethical? In my moral system something is unethical that hurt more people than it helps people. Like if I steal something from you or if I injure you physically or psychologically. As realtors we help vast majority of people who enjoy buying land in world, while we diminish the priviledge of people familiar with auction system. For a small margin we are willing bridge price gap between auction land and in world land, between huge parcels and small parcels. Thus it is not big surprise, that many player complaining here is not newbie or customers, but people who have been in Second Life since long time, often since beta. Sorry, Hiro, Catherine, Chris, Viola, Lynn etc., but the time of buying land at auction much cheaper than others have to pay in world is over for you. We have leveled playing field and the smaller our margin gets, the less is your advantage or priviledge of knowing how to play auction system. However, this is not immoral but rather the opposite, since it bring fairness and lower price for those who buy in world instead than camping website.

What is immoral however is:
- Calling activities of others that create value "immoral"
- Negatively labeling other people's business practise as "unfair" while they are honest and fair
- Telling people not buy from a certain person, while not a single customer ever has complained about unfair treatment from that person

I leave out the more bizzare and more obviously immoral things that some people enjoyed doing such as mass neg rate, personal attacks and so on. They don't apply to you Hiro, and I know you are person who want act moral way. I have respect for you for this. This is also why I believe you may be accessible to argument and willing to reflect on question of morality involved in all of this

Anshe,
My comments were to dismiss Lordfly's faulty analogy, so I'm not going to rehash all the old arguments again.

He was trying to equate what vendors do to what land sellers do. There's simply no analogy. Land sellers resell something. Builders / architects sell something that they made. Land barons effectively control a large part of the finite supply. Builders have unlimited supply and their product depends directly and solely on quality and price.

And there's no added value to the land, Anshe. Yes, you have to do work, sure. Yes, you can possibly argue that you do a "service" to SL, but the land itself has zero value added to it. The end user still gets the same land that they would have gotten if they had bought it themselves. If you want to defend land barony, this is not the argument to stick to.

The only value that could be added is if construction were done on the land. We've discussed this before, you still don't do it, and until you do please don't claim the land itself has any extra value. And please don't bring up terraforming or splitting parcels. That's just re-arranging land that's already there.

as far as i know LL does not do the following in all cases:
o Partitioning, reshaping land to the most desired size and terrain on market
o Offering payment services with at least US$ on PayPal, better also EUR, walking people through GOM/IGE etc
o Discussing with customer the type of land they are seeking and locating most suitable locations for them
o Developing payment plans or complicated swap deals, holding land arrangements etc

this are definitely services anshe provides to a group of players who desire it.

i generally do not provide payment plans or paypal because i do not have a customer base like her to know who is trustworthy or not. if there was a contractual mechanism to do so i would do it more often.