Buying and Selling Land

hee hee, Anshe, BAD business girl - BAD!

I could think of worse fates...
You go, Anshe!

Don't you mean 'Zionist'?

As to the other, granted, it's all you can eat, but what's the medical plan like?

Lol. I think you should really take deep breath and relax

Having said this, I also noticed some people suddenly leave auctions some days before the second big snow flood hit auctions in middle of last month. I must say I was kinda hit off guard by 40 new snow sims suddenly pop up all at once. If there was anyone in the market who knew about this, then Linden Labs should really be more careful with information leaks. But this is all speculation.

May I suggest that Linden Labs simple tells all of us about what kinda land is scheduled for when, before some people could theoretically know earlier than others? An open information policy might be easier than trying to prevent information leaks.

But beside this, please try avoid speculation without proof or conspiracy theories involving specific individual or groups of players.

Um, Ok Eltee. I give up on you. To me it seems foolish to believe that whether or not land baroning does in fact raise prices across the board for everyone (which I do not believe it does) any change to the system that just increases land costs even more is going to HELP the situation. All your doing is restricting -everyone- for a percieved problem that doesnt exist.

Some interesting statistics from the auctions that closed in the past 5 days:

1 player accounted for 33% of the plots won
a second player accounted for another 20% of the plots won
a third player accounted for another 10% of the plots won
a fourth player also accounted for another 10% of the plots won

THe player who won 33% of the plots added 177,000m to their holdings. I do not know if the player who accounted for 20% of the plots is associated with the first player, as the membership of the land group is kept private. The third player is unrelated. The fourth player may be associated with the first, I am uncertain. The remaining plots were spread across 25 players, including several others in the land trade business.

What does this mean? Over 70% of the plots of land in the last group of auctions are in the hands of 4 players. 85% of the plots over 4096m were won by one player. Mind you, they have 7 days to move their current land out before claiming this land, to avoid tiering up, while the end players who buy their land have to tier up right away. Fair, eh?

Does this mean there is no market for large plots? No - many of the people bidding against this player were non-land trading players trying to acquire large plots of land. Nearly all of the plots won had non land trader players bidding on them under 4096m as well.

When you have 70% of the auction land being won by 4 players, all of who are in the land speculating business, you cannot tell me the market is not being controlled by them. The auction system was put into place for us all to have a fair chance to buy land. It has instead become a wholesale market for land traders, who have the ability to reinvest their profits right back into the market. A player who wants land at an affordable price to build on cannot compete at all, and this is harmful to SL ultimately. The only people who argue that it is not harmful tend to be the same ones profitting off of it.

the fact remains cris that ll do not consider this a problem. ergo, all the proof, points made, requests for "fairness," et cetera are falling on deaf ears. you can hardly blame them. they're bound to be making more money this way. it's a short term solution reminisent of the dot.com fiasco. that's just my opinion of course.

this type of behaviour is apparently a valid part of the thriving virtual economy that will drive this new country to fruition. who are we to point out what we perceive to be flaws in the system? we are the bellyachers that will very likely stick it out after all. where else are we gonna go. they've got us and they know it.

If this is the truth Khamon, then why did Haney Linden post this in another "first page" thread today?




*Note* This is a direct quote other than me fixing the URL

The thread where this was posted can be found Here

Khamon,

I understand your cynicism. I honestly feel the same way sometimes. It seems that it is profitting them enormously, so why fix what isn't broken in their minds. You are also right in the catch 22 that a lot of players feel. They want land, so they begrudgingly pay inflated prices, and then the same people who just raped them financially say "ooh look, the market supports my prices, I'm a fucking genius". It is depressing, especially when you watch a player get away with the financial equivalent of murder in SL and Linden Lab seems to constantly turn a blind eye to it. We get more feedback on what is wrong with our posts than we ever get about them even considering this issue.

is it rape or is it murder? or is it a rape covered up by murder? your rhetoric is making me dizzy!

I am not an economic person by far. I recognize though the problem we have with a "middle man" syndrome that has seemed to take over the land buying and selling in SL. For some, it works just fine. For others, it keeps them from one of, if not the most appealing and valuable features of SL, and that is land.

Many have come up with vaild solutions. I have one such thought myself. But personally I do not see why there cannot be a mix of ways to aquire land in SL. Perhaps taking the suggestions of those who have given them, and testing them on small scales to see how it works. I don't see the harm in that. Just as I once suggested that we have a mixture and variety of ways to win "developer incentives" (and LL is working with this now - though I honestly doubt it was due to my own suggestion as others thought the same way as well), I don't see why it cannot hold true for Land Buying.

That said, here is my one suggestion that may help with land buying. Why not offer a variety of auctions where some are open to only those who hold a certain amount of land currently? We could still have auctions that are open to anyone regardless, but there could also be auctions that are open to only those already in a current low tier. And just within a certain tier, and only those who currently hold land for the landless plots. Making a variety of "entrance applications" could go a long way to spread out who can and cannot obtain certain plots through auction.

Rather than take away what is already there, why not add variety and more options?

That is my suggestion for what it is worth.

Mwah, love you too baby.

1- how about increasing first land options to 1024? and all first land is returned to LL, so it remains a community of relatively new players. this will maintain a certain degree of cohesion to these areas and give players an option to have 1024 of land, much more useful to an experienced player.

2- all players are eligible for a certain marked out 512/or 1024 plots as first land rights. as in #1 these lands can never be altered. this gives all players the oppurtunity to scale back to 0 and then still come back into the game.

these approaches will take 512 and 1024 plot consumers, who are willing to pay the highest L$/m2 values out of the market and make things easier on large parcel owners. land prices will inch down a bit.

cristiano, a few posts ago you mentioned people who were not land sellers who lost on the auctions. in an open market, i have no sympathy for someone who's bid is too low. it is like trying to buy L$'s on GOM for 1 USD/block. you won't get it. it seems to be an arguement that you can only support with with rhetoric or rape, murder and eventually nazism. the real discussion should not focus on people who want land cheaper than market value, but how can land be managed so the free open market value of land can be lowered or the process so transparent that i do not have feel the need to defend my practices from belligerent people with half baked propoganda ideas about collusion, conspiracy, and philip's sex clones managing the land market.

I love this idea. The large scale land speculators get a good deal, LL saves man hours, and the land can be resold at lower prices as competing bids will not exist. Perhaps they should sell more than one sim at a time this way, minimum 3-5 sims maybe. This should give the high volume barons all the land they want cheaply and leave the auctions for the end user/new barons.

All your arguments of fair market value do not hold any weight, Jauani, when the market is controlled by a small group of players. It is not rhetoric, I illustrated the results of just one group of auctions - I am sure previous ones have followed the same pattern. That is not a free open market, it is a market being dominated by wealthy players made more wealthy by their land profits, that they can afford to reinvest right back into the land. You seem think anyone who wants land should just suck it up and choose to pay for land at whatever price it is sold for, since everyone seems to have unlimited disposeable income. I think a discussion about this can also do without your own rhetoric, since it does not hold a lot of weight as someone who has partaken in it. You may not have any sympathy for a player who is trying to get land to build on and is outbid by a player who has made a fortune on the auctions and can afford to bid as necessary on any piece of land to acquire it, but many people do.

i've been thinking about this for a couple of days since RObin brought it up. i am in favour of more sims going on the auction block. and not simply to serve land baron interests.

several months ago, LF brought up an idea of letting players do the planning. i think if developer players were given the proper tool they could do a good job at this.

the most important tools i believe are
1 - to be able to allow group officers to manage land without owning it so the capital investor is not at risk, with a third over arching membership category that can manage it's agents (officers).

some players may decide to run massive sim wide or multi sim wide rental communities but need to hire help to maintain thier internal ToS. LL can only encourage this kind of in world evolution by removing this difficulty of trust with anonymity by fixing the mechanism and allowing agents of the capital investor to have power to act without threatening her investment.

2 - the option to turn over a certain amount of land, onces it's content is approved by LL artists, to LL for the governor to maintain.

in this manner, dynamic communities can be developed by players for public consumption and the public content turned over to LL. the public areas can be designed based on LL's guidelines from prim and land allotments and other criterias. a group of players could lay out these communities but always have the freedom to move on in the future. or in teh case of a develepor, to sell these properties to consumers. at somepoint, if the community falls apart, a player in the future could collect all the land and once she owns all the private land, LL could turn over the public land to allow the new owner to redesign the sim.

Jauani,

Your suggestion is excellent, because once again, it involves actual development of land. It would create a competitive development market instead of just a competitive credit line market. As nice as the sims that have been created so far are, I would like to see what members of the community can do with the land, with the proper tools as you suggested. I have seen shades of it in the island sims - some of them are quite nice, and there is no reason the same concepts could not be parlayed to the mainland market. Simply shuffling around land and subdividing it is not development.

cristiano,
i have no sympathy because i am both of these players you speak of and i am intelligent enough to understand that the price of land will always be what we as a collective community are are willing to pay for it. when i buy land for personal use i find land that appeals to me and am prepared to pay what my research shows is the market value at the time. for example, the water fall land i sold you, i paid 10L$/m2 for it in the summer. i sold it to you for 8 L$/m2 because that was the market value at the time. when i buy land to resell, i look for land which is significantly cheaper then what i expect someone will be willing to pay for it if i were to hold it for a while or parcel it into smaller pieces.

people who are interested in large parcels of land at a controlled price should buy islands or share islands with friends. people who want to be part of the grid should be prepared to deal with the open market.

i think you are over estimating the ability of any group of players to control the land market. the grid consists of how many sims? 400? that's over 25 000 000 m2 of land. that's a lot of potential of land trading hands daily. the auctions now represent a fraction of the world. if speculators tried to up land to 15 L$/m2, wouldn't a lot of players in the established grid take the oppurtunity to sell and make some L$?

the real issue here is not land price manipulation. it's that there is recourse amongst the player community. in FL you can't complain to god and say life is not fair, i'm tiering down and deactivating my account. well some people do, but then thier choice doesn't really set back the universe's quarterly earnings. imagine how ridiculous these arguements would sound about land prices rising when your city suddenly experiences unheralded growth that the city officials and developers are having trouble keeping up with.
SL on the other hand is a business and if enough players can convince LL that they would make more money socializing the land market, i'm sure it can work. but as in places in RL where land and other services are overly regulated by the administration, there will be an emergent black market for the choiciest land, i promise you and the players running that will be less to your liking.

First of all, of those sims, 75% of them or more are solidly sold, nearly half for quite awhile - the only significant openings ever are in sims that have been brought to auction for the first time. Occasionally plots come up in older sims, but it is rare for anything more than a handful of plots to come along. So the argument that there is that much land available is not true. When land was over $15 a meter, you did not see massive selloffs of land in SL, any more than usual. What you saw was the same group of people hawking their land at that price and saying "This is the market value!".

For a very long time, there *has been* price manipulation as outline in the forums by individuals not picking up their tiered amounts.

J -- you know as well as I that you can't make a profit, a decent profit if land prices are manipulated -- and what will happen when the newbies, i.e., the new account to SL slow down considerably with the release of three, *count 'em* three different MMORG's coming out on the market. Where will the $$$'s be spent then? $15 USD here, $15 USD there -- and no one will be purchasing land in SL.

But please don't state that there hasn't been manipulation of the land prices. We've proven that in previous threads.

Long live 7/3 for land prices.

i agree there were circumstances which allowed players to shirk thier tier payments and thus further increase thier margin at the expense of LL's earnings. i did not participate in that, and i am glad to see LL is taking measures to eliminate that possibility.


at 7 L$/m2 an entire sim is 2200 USD. i don't want to hear anymore complaining from your camp about the bids for sims

Jauani, I appreciate what you are saying, and your perspective. . . but from our perspective - the simple truth of the matter is that if the average player Could win in the auctions, they Would be, and they just simply aren't.

The really big barons, and the ones willing to extort the system for all its worth by stretching (I'd say breaking) the rules are making enough money where your profit margin theories lose some ground. . . they have enough land, and can profit well enough from half of it to cover the fees, that they can just hold the land they had to overbid on until prices get to a point where they make a profit. This is only risky if LL decides to dump an outrageous amount of land into the system.

Players aren't deciding they don't want land and just giving up. They want land, but just aren't winning in the auctions.

Ok.. I'm not a ditz..nor do I play one in SL. Jauani, since you are one of the few I do not personally know (at least I dont think I do.. even though I would like to ). I am curious to your statement of my post above?

Personally I am worried this thread has become a pissing match so much so that new ideas will not be considered. I doubt that will really happen though. I know it is just bashfull feelings. *blush*

Pendari,

I think your idea is great. There should be a variety of channels for purchasing land to give players new opportunities. Having players be able to buy land cheaply (and no, Jauani, having a player have to go to GOM and shell out $100 to buy a 1024 or 2048m plot is not cheap or fair), especially new players, is beneficial to the health of SL. I think having things like auctions where those who have never bid before, or those who own no lland would be excellent additions to the current flawed system.

*refers y'all to the earlier posts about people standing around in welcome areas asking people to buy them landless land* How bad do you think the abuse would be under a system like that?
"Oh, well, your new! So how about you take this for half the price."
"What's that? Oh... You've been here for a while and you love the game?"
"Ok Ok! Full Price!"



How do you know? I was watching the auctions pretty closely during the past months while all the sim releases took place, and for a good while no one was bidding on auction, regardless of price, to the point that even the highest land barons we're winning more than they truly wanted for AMAZING prices. Where we're these people then? This was the very recent past.