Land Sales: "Make Offer"

Forgive me if this has been suggested already. I'm a little out of sync.

Trading land is a very risky proposition.

For example, you want to trade your 512sqm with someone else's, for whatever reason. You set yours for sale at $0 to them... and they buy it but then they reneg... or accidentally set theirs for sale at L$0 and forget to specify you as the buyer. Sure you could try charging each other a fair rate for the parcels during the trade, but I find that most folks just don't have that kinda L$ to back that up.

SO, what I suggest is the ability to "Make an Offer" (in land or L$ or both!) for someone's parcel.

When you open the 'About Land...' window on your own land, you'd have a new option: [x] accept offers. (fairly obvious purpose)

If you open 'About Land...' on someone else's parcel and they are accepting offers, you'd see a (Make Offer) button. The window that pops up would accept a landmark and/or a number of L$'s.

When you submit an offer the parcel and funds you've offered are *FROZEN* you can't sell/subdivide/spend/modify/whatever. (sent and received offers could be listed in the 'My Land...' window, so they can easily be found and acted upon or cancelled later.)

The recipient of an offer would be be IM'd when the offer is made, and sent the landmark of the parcel being offered. They can then inspect the offered land and in offered parcel's "About Land..." window hit the (accept offer) or (reject offer) button. Accept would complete the deal right then, reject would unfreeze the other player's funds/land.

If the recipient of the offer subdivides the parcel the offer is made for, all offers would immediately be cancelled and an IM sent back to the sender saying that the offer fell through.

A feature like this would take a lot of the fear and distrust out of land-swaps and really empower people to swap and consolidate their scattered micro-parcels "For Prims!" with confidence.

Thoughts?

Not a bad proposal, except for the "freezing" of the land with only one offer made. Otherwise a very good proposal.

I was doing a trade with aurora Fairplay the other day, and that went quite nicely and quickly. During this I was thinking about the risks.

If you have someone verbally agree, you can always go back into the records with an abuse report and confirm someone's broken a promise so that Lindens can take action.

First I'd suggest the name be changed to "trade land" because I had thought something completely different.

I do like the thought of having a secure way to trade land. I don't like the thought of adding overhead to the UI / game engine by adding features that essentially don't add any more value than regular Instant Messages.

What I would suggest is a "trade land" feature that pops up a window with two columns, one for each player. This could be integrated with the find land feature, and then each player could search for and add land to their column. Perhaps a place to input L$ (for land deals that aren't quite clean swaps) could also be added under each column. Each player would have an "agree" button which would unselect if the other player changed the contents of his column, or changed the land itself.


-Hiro Pendragon

Hiro, I like that idea. You have my support.

a simple land-trade dialog would probably work better, have something bring up dialog listing plots, each selects the ones they wish to offer to the table, transaction goes through only after both parties have confirmed, either of them changes anything the confirm the other made would be cleared.

Thanks for pointing that out Eggy! Hunter Linden's post is far more well phrased than my own.

Hiro: I meant that only the land/funds being used to bid for a parcel would be frozen. The parcel being bid on would not be frozen... and if modified would invalidate the current bids.

I don't necessarily want to duplicate the function of IM's... but I did want the process to still work just as well if the two players can't be online at the same time.

And having spent 3-4 hours last night on a cluster of land purchase and trades, boy would I rather spend time building than fiddling with the logistics of land trading (No offense to the the charming company involved in last night's trades!)