Did You Buy and Sell Your First Land?

I'm curious how newbies (and some oldbies with new accounts) approach the often mystifying and scary prospect of buying land in SL.

A figure the Lindens don't release for some reason is the number of people who come in the game, get the $9.95 account, and then buy first land...and then resell it to buy more land, or leave the game.

Let's try to get even a very rough straw poll to get a handle on that number.

I see some newbies pick up the concept of buying first land for $512 right away, get highly-prized land on the waterfront or in the telehub areas, and resell it handily for a profit, and go on to get 10 more 512s like it

And believe it or not, they aren't oldbies in a new account, but just smart people.

Others hesitate and dither and then buy $512 but get griefed and uglied and run screaming selling it for $1000 -- when they could probably get three times that amount if they waited.

I was shocked to have an otherwise extremely savvy and technically proficient newb tell me that she'd sell me her $512 for $512 and didn't care (she was renting from me) -- she seemed either not to understand, or not to believe in, or not care about, the prospect of earning up to $5000 for first land resale (more likely $3000 for M nowadays, and $2000 for PG)

I'd like to hear from people who have birthdates ONLY AFTER JANUARY 1, 2005, i.e. with the current climate and tools in the game, not experiences of oldbies from long ago when the game was different and rules for land and prims and free 4096, etc. were different.

What about the experience of people who came in after the 1.2 changes, but before January of this year? I sold my first land for about L$5000 I think, and that was... hmm... I think September 2004.

Lianne, I've already gotten quite used to the fact that you dislike me, and come into any comment I make, positive, negative, or neutral, with something snarky, to play some kind of one-upmanship type of game you evidently need to play.

So I could chose to read your current contribute in the snarky tone it may have been written, and answer thusly: start your own damn poll.

Or I could take your comment at utterly face value, devoid of attitude and context, and still answer thusly: start your own damn poll.

I was trying to capture people who came in recently, picking an arbitrary date that was after that patch, but that's because I'm not one of those tekkies who thinks in terms of patch dates and patch versions, but thinks in terms of RL months or other significant economic events that shook up the world, like "the end of the events grant" or "the opening of the new continent."

SO I tried to pick just a recent quarterly period to try to see how the cumulative effect of the game has operated on peoples' decisions to buy and sell first land.

My first land was a 512k parcel in Brown - one of the first LL subdivisions. I paid $512 and sold it for $512.

Now I'm wealthy beyond my fondest dreams.

With my brand new premium account I dutifully bought my first land for L512, after a week or so of playing around.

Then a neighbour started buying the surrounding land and building this really ugly castle thing, so I totally lost interest.

I was never there anyways, have little interest in building, so I gave it away to a friend who is more interested.

Now I've downgraded to a basic account and I'm not sure I would get to keep it anyways...

I never took advantage of the old land for the landless, a friend gave me 1024, I kept it about a week then started buying up Jenner hehehe and since then I have moved to my own sim... never worried about money in SL, I dont want my SL experience to be another job. So even now at the 195$ level I dont worry a bit about it making any money, this is simply an entertainment expense for me and a very well spent one

I wasn't being snarky, I was saying that I sold my land for the landless plot for about the figure you gave there, before the date you set. I answered the poll before I read the post.

I don't want to start my own poll because I don't care about this issue really... I just thought you might want to have some accuracy... as it is you're going to miss maybe half the people who got land for the landless land...

Anyway, do what you like

My first land was in Stillman during beta, long before the First Land concept - it was all first land for us - since there were no prim limits you didn't really think in terms of m2, so I'm not sure how big the plot was. Taeja kept having a habit of getting naked in our little PG sim cabin so I decided to move over to Stanford. I let the original land go public, and the same with the land in Stanford when I moved to Federal. The Federal land was the first land I bought post beta, and I still own the original plot I started with there (financed by the lovely Beryl Greenacre since I was broke).

i've been around a little longer than jan 05 but not by much, so i am going to post my experience

i actually posted on the forums to get advice on what to do. i knew that i wanted land, wanted to take advantage of the great first land price, but wanted more than a 512. i had no idea that you could buy first land & then turn around & sell it for a profit.

i bought my 512 in refugio, traded it the same day to jauani wu (shout out to my fellow canadian....firechick is awesome ) & used the cash towards the purchase of a 1536 in snow land that jauani had for sale. i wanted waterfront but couldn't afford it at the time. snow was cheap, so snow it was....being canadian i actually like snow . once i could afford waterfront, i sold my snow land & used that cash to buy some lovely waterfront property. as you know prok, i bought that 1536 from you. i love my home in ravenglass & don't intend on going anywhere anytime soon.

Mystic, I have the same join date as you, and I had a similar experience even in similar sims, it's funny. And it's nice for me to hear from somebody who's game experience comes from the same era as I did, because what happens in a thread like this is that a few oldbies glom on to smother you with their philosophy that nobody must ever make a dime, that they must be altruistic (fake) in the tekkie wiki, and sell land they got for $512 for only $512 for the "good of the community" even in a rare Linden-zoned sim. Bollocks.

I didn't get a 512 for the longest time because it took me awhile to figure out what tier means, where you go with the 512, etc. I remember thinking like in TSO, you could pick, say, a dense forest out in the middle of nowwhere, and just go and right-click on it to buy. So I flew out to some area with a lot of woods that looked empty to me, and vainly right-clicked and right-clicked...and went nowhere. It just wouldn't "buy". It's because it was empty, but already owned by somebody just keeping it for beauty or prims. I remember studying the new land list, but being baffled by it. So I kept my own counsel and tried to figure it out.

First I joined a land group in Igbo near friends from TSO. I put a 512 donation in there, but the tools were such at the time that it didn't seem to use up my privilege.

So next, I got several accounts. On one, I got a first-land in Refugio which I still have today, I love it, it is on rocky waterfront (I have it for rent now with a stone house on it, I love the whole area -- it's snowy but rocky too in parts).

I then went over to Whinlatter which seemed really pristine and pretty and I bought 3 first lands next to each other. They were all on what I thought was waterfront. Of course, I was a clueless newb and didn't realize that this was the "end of the world" and was destined to become the middle of a sim with another sim's land on it. Watch out for that one! But it seemed cool, because you could pick up the edge of the sim and look underneath and see how the Lindens made stuff and put plants. I had those 3 plots together in a kind of jagged funny line on land that was pretty much worthless LOL. But I was happy. I had a plan to recreate a hotel there, but after banging around a lot there (you can't get past the shoreline) and struggling to build on a rocky/hilly area, I decided to put it up for sale.

I also bought in Wetheral on the auction -- just a small amount, I believe it was 1024 and 1536, because I wanted to see what happened when you tried to sell land. My experiences there were bitter. Someone built gigantic, blocked my property completely, lagged the sim, and "ruined my second life" like the sign said yesterday. No Lindens could do anything about it. I grimly kept trying to sell this land, spoiled by this older and feted player. One night as I was struggling to learn how to parcel and sell the land right, Anshe appeared at my elbow and offered to liquidate me out. I felt that would be an admission of defeat, so I said, no, I'll gut it out. Eventually, that merciless griefer bought the land to make and even more big fucking bothersome thing that lagged the sim even more.

Back in Whinlatter, I would log on daily and sit and try to collect dwell points. Well, I could be forgiven for not shedding my TSO habits lightly. I think I managed to squeak out about $4 that week in dwell LOL. Gave me lots of chance to contemplate Linden nature and meet neighbours. I decided to try to sell this land.

A woman who lived right next store promptly bought the 3 for I believe $9000. That was my first land sale in SL. And it taught me that land that is absolutely worthless and might have even been a "mistake" for you could be worth something to that person who is near it in a sim and wants to expand.

Many people hate land selling and even and fear land owning and hate scammers and fear exploits NEEDLESSLY and so they MISTAKENLY BELIEVE that you can only get 512 once, on only one credit card.

Not at all true. You can only get *free trial accounts* once -- but 512 land is separate. The Lindens give you up to 4 accounts available on a credit card. This is legal, and it is not discouraged. Go and see. You can buy first land from any of the accounts if you wish. The chances of finding first lands next to each other in a decent area to link are slim of course.

And it is almost not worth it because most first land is crappy, you might wait weeks or months even before you could sell it at anything really worth while. All that time you will be paying $9.95 a month for each one of those lands, and if you are like me, you wn't want to get the discount to go to a quarterly system because you will be hesitant about the game.

The other boon to have several accounts is that you can put 3 of them together to make a group. You're going to need that in this game because the land tools really suck, people are treacherous, and if you make them officers, they will kill you and take your land OR delete all the buildings they've made in one fell swoop even if you've worked hard on the club and events in them, too. I've learned that the real hard way! And that's how I made my first land group Dysfunction Junction, and I linked and sold that land that was worthless, except not to that woman.

Lots of older and vicious players with free 4096 and feting are likely to scream that this is an exploit, but it is not. I can only encourage other new players to do this because this game is nasty, brutish, and short otherwise given the huge steep learning curve and the really nasty and condescending and brutal attitude you will find from some of the older players here -- and by that I mean even people with not charter status, and maybe not much older than us, but with attitudes as big as the Ritz.

After I sold that land in Wetheral, I was confident that I could take my interest in land and my willingness to learn and invest on the Linden auction. That took a fair amount of study.

But before I figured out Wetheral, I had earlier made my first auction purchase in Refugio. I had gotten first land there, loved it and saw that more was available and that for something like $200 US I could have like 12k or so, and then in another smaller parcel, enough to make a quarter of a sim, 16896.

For various sad reasons, I was forced to sell Refugio but I made a profit in my game even given the tier on it, first by renting it to people who paid the tier, and then by sellling it to them. And then after awhile, they swapped with Anshe, and I was able to buy part of it once again. Now I own land for a mall, Hanging Garden of Babylon. I love Refugio and I'm glad I started my first land there so long ago in my age of innocence, and I continue in Refugio well past the age of cynicism induced by harsh experiences in this game.

I remember as a silly newbie, I was so scared by owning land and having tier -- all kinds of new and old friends ganged up on me and tried to intimidate me over this issue -- that I immediately sold off half my auction win. I was a clueless newb, and had no idea that I'd gotten some really good priced mature land that was half snow, to be sure, but waterfront, secluded with a basin, and surrounded by Linden water on 3 sides -- a peninsula. This was right after the snow crash of course.

Someone told me to sell my land to Jauani Wu, that he was a land baron, but a "nice" land baron. I IM'd him but he said he didn't have enough tier. I didn't understand fully what that meant, and it took me some time to get it. I didn't now how to price or sell my land. I was afraid if I put a too high price on it, that I'd get laughed out of town. I had already been warned about snow, even mature snow. SO I put 6.5/meter on it, and it instantly sold to Anshe Chung overnight. Whereupon Anshe held that snow for MONTHS afterwards. I finally bought it back after I had saved some money.

Selling that half of the auction plot was invigorating though because I was able to see that you could buy land, and instantly sell it, pretty much, so as not to be afraid of being "stuck". And I could also see that I could cash that sale proceeds out on the GOM, and restore back some of my purchase price.

Once I did that, I found it wasn't hard to take the proceeds of this and a few other sales and invest in Ravenglass, an entire sim. I had to take all kinds of sniping and snarking from oldbies for *gasp* buying a whole sim like an ebil land baron, but I did it by merely doing what anybody could do, buying some first land, selling it, investing it in larger pieces of land, etc. and then selling parcels on the whole sim after it was developed.

I wasn't the first to form a residential community in SL, or the first to sell residential houses with land, but I do believe I was the first, if not among the first, to place reasonably-priced and reasonably-sized plots of 1024 and 2048 on the open market, available to anybody, not just my friends, from any walk of life, from any lifestyle, joined only by the desire to share a nice view and share extra prims. And I remain devoted to that goal in SL.

I didn't see an "eat me, capitalist pig!" option, so I didn't vote.

I bought "Land for the Landless" in my first or second week ingame (July 04), and I still live there. I love my landless land - besides, I'm inclined to stick in one spot as my real life has involved too many moves. I've suffered through the ugly neighbors and unfinished builds, but it's my little spot and I'll never move.

I didn't vote.

I had my land for the landless in Jizo for most of the summer, but I finally moved to Grant shortly after it was created. I kept that land through a great deal. Less than a day or two after I joined, Billy Madison came along and offered me L$500 for the parcel. He had amassed quite a bit of land for the landless in the sim that way. Thankfully, another experienced player had just stopped in to welcome me and warned me that the offer was unfair. Later, I began acquiring my neighbors' parcels when the opportunity arose, and I eventually had something like 4608 in that sim. Unfortunately, it was broken into three discontiguous parcels, and I wanted to have one larger piece of land. At that point, I sold the land to Anshe and left for Grant.