Global Land Value

How should the global land market be calculated? Obviously, individual plots have an objective worth, but the land market is HOT. How hot?

Very, simply dont buy any land for a month or so, tier down, and the land prices will drop.

Ryen, get some sleep. Your answers are no longer relevant to the questions.

And your's... are?

Anyway, this isn't about me buying land, or anyone buying land. It's a global projection of the market as it stands.

Well, if you bring pickles into the equasion, then the price of land becomes moot.

People should only be buying land because they want to actually use it, not so they can extort money from those who actually do want to use it. I think LL needs to cap land prices for player land transactions and make it so that land must be held through at least two tier cycles before it can be resold.

What people should do is not a function of what they will do.

True Darwin Which is why land speculation needs to be turned into a much riskier proposition.

Make land free! Just the monthly fee!
Make land free! Just the monthly fee!
all together now
Make land free! Just the monthly fee!
even you Darwin
Make land free! Just the monthly fee!

I cringe everytime I see you say this. In theory we are all grown ups and should be able to make our own choices without ma and pop Linden turning SL into a totalitarian regime.

Ordinarily I'd agree with you wholeheartedly Kas, but not on this. You mentioned in another thread that you're a nester and need a place to call your own to have fun. I'm the same way. So are a lot of other people. Land speculation drives up the cost of entry for new people without adding anything to their SL experience except a good chance they'll be priced out completely. I just don't think that land should be thought of in the same way that user created content is. More content brings more consumers. We need a lot more people like you who can create things of value for which you profit, giving you more time to create things of value, drawing in more people to consume what you create. Land profiteering in no way aids that process and if it keeps people from getting involved then we all lose. I'm definitely an SL capitalist and I'm all for people profiting from the fruits of their SL labors. Land speculation produces nothing but a barrier to entry. Let the economy be driven by user created content, not land.

Darwin, I think there is an algorithmic index we can create; and I have been working on the problem for about a week now (need more data tho.)

-Adam

Hmm well I'm just a Newbie and maybe I'm overlooking something, But newbies can always get in the Land for the Landless lottery. So lands not hard for new peaple to get.

That's all I did and two days later I have the top of a mountain for 512. A great spot. I'd gladly sell it at 20 times what I paid for it. To get some cash and to become landless again. So I could get back in the Land for the Landless Lottery. Only this time I'll be able to get some really cool toys too.

Hmmm maybe 10,000 is to much, I'd lower my price to 5,000 but I'm probably missing something. If it Seems to good to be true, it probably is .... So someone go ahead tell me why this won't work.
The plot next to mine is going for 17,000 and its the same size as mine. Of course it isnt next to one of those giant 10 by 10 spinning day glo & night glow LAND FOR SALE SIGNS like mine is.

Oh and how do I get one of those nifty avatars for my posts I can't find any reference to any such thing here's one i made.its at http://www.rageprod.com/racerx80.gif lil help. please

Unless the Lindens have changed something, you can only get Land for the Landless once.

In theory you can only go through the land for the landless program once. 17k is way over priced, but that doesn't mean someone won't buy it. 5k used to be the high end for a plot that size, now its low. Sigh...

wow youguys are fast. went back and looked it just say's for new peaple with no land. So then I'm not newbie anymore YAY!!

If you click like 12 links you will see the actual rules where it says you can only use it once.

oh missed that but found the avatar thing.

RacerX, with all due respect, your personal Land for the Landless experience has nothing to do with this conversation (facinating as your post is), nor do the unnessesary caps and colors.

I agree with you whole-heartedly, Chip. Land isn't a user created product -- it's a server resource owned by Linden Lab. It should be possible for every L$5/mo player to own at least 512 sq m of land by dealing with Linden Lab.

Chip,

Yes, I agree. I'm normally the first one to get totalitarian icicles down the back when those in charge do something that seems to me to be sinister. But putting a cap on land prices or otherwise regulating the market doesn't seem at all sinister to me.

Land is a resource that many players find indispensible, and it's limited. It seems wrong to me for people to use it as a trading resource.

I agree, land prices are sky high... but doesn't this echo real life? I know for a fact that land (especially in UK mainland, around the major towns and cities) is going for shocking amounts. Is this not how economies go? The point is to buy cheap and sell for more; wait for your land to grow in value and when you think the time is right, sell it. But in contrast to this, there will be times when the 'land purchasing' boom phases out and people want to buy for example, cars? Then vehicles prices will sore and other items ingame will decrease.

But what about the people who purchase the one time fee of $9.95?
Do we have to suffer the embarrasment of poverty and landlessness whilst the other wealithier inhabitants of this game bask in their wads of cash in their appartment skyscrapers? Perhaps a limit in the amount of land purchasale is needed; in order to get more, should a manual Linden moderated system be set up to evaluate each case for extra land, to see if they are worthy of it?

As far as I can see, the problems in land value that we are suffering from at the moment is pretty natural. This is inevitable and hopefully these 'mishaps' will iron themselves out over time and hopefully never raise their singed faces again.

I think it's unlikely that object prices will ever be an issue in the same way land prices are, because if people can't afford an object they can always try to make it themselves. Land can't be created in the same way.

Also, if you're comparing the Linden land prices to UK ones, according to bbc.co.uk "The price of residential land in the UK has increased a staggering eight-fold over the last 20 years." SL prices are rising far, far faster than that. Also from the Beeb: "If house-building in England continues at the levels recorded in 2001, there will be a shortfall of more than 400,000 homes by 2021." The land price situation in the UK is not a healthy economical blip, it's a very worrying situation, if this goes on another 20 years I'll be renting at extortionate prices from creepo landlords my entire life. So comparing the SL situation to that in UK would be to suggest that something in SL is going very wrong.

Linden Lab IS regulating the prices... They are just running behind in their modifications.

This is all a new experience, not just for us players, but for the company itself and indeed, the world! The whole concept of virtual land sales is so new, little is known about its dynamics. So if the economy sufferes from large "mood swings" in prices, it's only to be expected.

I'm not looking forward to the forum posts 4 months from now about how the glut of land has bottomed out land prices and no one can get their full investments back by selling... And the innevitable back-and-forth of "I told you so"s. "it's all your fault"s and "it serves you right"s.

LL has been adding sims to the game at a rate of 3-5 a week, with the last few weeks' worth in one big batch of 25. The bottleneck was getting it in the grubby hands of future land owners through the auctions. Now they have doubled the speed at which the new land gets hit with the gavel. This means they can now go from 3-5 sims a week to 5-10 sims, or whatever is needed to help stabilize prices.


But, as usual on a hot topic... We stray from the point this thread was created for.

YES... The Land for the Landless is not going to go away any time soon. What seemed to start out as an experiment now apears to be a necessary part of the SL experience. With more and more people joining, confusion over having to post in a thread hidden away in the forums will become a real problem. Many new players may never have used a web-based forum before, or even know what a "thread" means, let alone how to find one out of the multitudes of weaves we have here.

When a player chooses to tier up when editing their acocunt on the web site, they should be given a checkbox option called "Apply for a basic 512 square meter plot (cost: L$512)" with a link to what that means. Simple, straightforward, and not likely to cause errors.

If not that, then some way to "enter" lotteries (like for Luna's mall or Busy Ben's lots) should be built into SL's interface. This sort of psudo-thread is started a lot now-a-days. The recent float competition is a good example.