Bay City Land Auctions

After a visit last week to Ahern as part of an avatar-prejudice experiment a group I'm in was doing, I'm not sure close proximity to that particular spot is a selling point.


I know what you're saying though, Mari

That is 120 months of $5 tier. 10 years of tier. Amazing.

hmmm that makes me think some flippers are becoming desperate

That was a plot I wasn't watching: it's the 1024 right behind the rail depot in docklands. That would be interesting to know.

I will offer to you 3 prims for an insigna, i can't give you more since i need many more than those...

PS: i where the one bettin on the 4ee, i'm not sure if i were luck or unlucky but i fall asleep waiting the end i a wake up like in a nightmare at 11:04:40 seconds... my browser got age to load the page and adios 4ee... i had to turn on the next one (95k ...nothing less). I feel happy + sad + totally stoopid.. more the third.

It's amazing to see how many people feed into the LL hype that is Bay City!

In the 1st wave of auctions, a lot were bought up by land flippers from the Far East. I've seen one 384 sq/m now back on the market for 120000 L . I guess you could fit a hut on it! Another plot, a corner 1344 sq/m plot set for sale at 273000 L. (1000 USD!!). You can barely build a main shop on those 1024 sq/m plots, so its hard to see how one would recover that kind of investment.

There's also an assumption that this will be a popular vibrant area for businesses....thats all it is....an assumption! This isn't SL of 2006 where we had a few thousand SIM's most of which were Mainland, the new grid contains 23000 sims and rising! It's so much harder to concentrate traffic into areas.....which is one of the chief reasons (along with new ALL search) why the majority of shopping malls are failing.

I guess since the gambling ban, this is the next best thing to speculate in!
IMO there's enough daft people out there to feed into this frenzy....I just hope these same people have set aside enough RL money for the the increased fuel, energy and food prices that about to hit them!

...and before people criticise me for my above comments......yes, i could easily afford several plots to bid on just from my SL sales.....but i recognise "Fool's Gold" when i see it!

I agree about these land flippers.. but i don't agree in general, many of us didn't bought it pointing to an investiment return, and me in particular i wanted one for a totally different reason.

Well if you treat it as a "sunk cost" and just purely for presence on this LL project, that's different. I think TRU textures have managed to grab a plot.....i'm sure it will act as a Mainstore land giver more than anything else. It's far too small, other than to house a few sample texture packs. Again, this is all on the assumption that this will be a vibrant area. Not sure i want to pay 120k purely on speculation....call me cautious rather than a risk taker.

If you really want a plot, you have to win the auction bid....otherwise you'll end up paying 25-50% over and above from Land flippers.....now that's even more stupid!

Thanks for your offer, but I'll pass. 4ee was one I was only slightly looking at, because it was a bit small for me.

Mari

Bay City parcel 4o - Molesworth (45,156) 1024m Current bid: L$175,010.00
Bay City parcel 4nn - Molesworth (26,25) 896m Current bid: L$110,010.00
Bay City parcel 4n - Molesworth (12,157) 1024m Current bid: L$102,410.00
Bay City parcel 4q - Molesworth (119,151) 1024m Current bid: L$102,410.00

I looked at 4nn across from the Bowling alley, great location not enough space to build anything significant, yet people are killing themselves for it...

Talk about investment bubbles.

Now where was that pin?

I may be all wrong in this prediction; but planned communities like
Bay City tend to be too sterile to actually harbor freewheeling humanity.

We'll see. =)

Consider Disney's Celebration experiment.

There's a lot LL could learn from this article, The Celebration Controversies:

http://www.intbau.org/essay8.htm

- i

I am looking at the map of Bay City and it is very clear that:

1. Bay City has a LOT of room to expand in 3 directions

2.Financially that the current lots are a huge hit for LL.

So therefore, I think we can expect that major expansion will be put on the front burners and as time goes on, the Sims will just be able to be duplicated and just rotated to keep the look form being too cloned.

I am definitely putting any bidding on hold until the fire sale comes along. Linden labs has a history of pumping out new land until they totally destroy all demand for it.

I almost got excited for a few minutes there, watching the Molesworth 4l (768m2) auction close just now..

LL$120,210.00 1(1) 5/28/08 7:59 AM Won Anonymous
LL$120,200.00 1(0) 5/28/08 7:59 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$92,500.00 1(0) 5/28/08 7:59 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$76,800.00 1(0) 5/27/08 4:32 PM Lost Anonymous
LL$71,200.00 1(0) 5/28/08 7:56 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$70,000.00 1(0) 5/28/08 5:30 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$32,000.00 1(0) 5/27/08 5:36 PM Lost Anonymous
LL$30,120.00 1(0) 5/27/08 4:04 PM Lost Anonymous
LL$26,500.00 1(0) 5/27/08 10:54 AM Lost Anonymous

Up until just before it closed, it was in the low L$70k's. Then it shot up to L$120k in the final 30 seconds or so of bidding.

Molesworth 4m (768m2) is similar, except for the jump to 120k at the very end..

LL$95,010.00 1(1) 5/28/08 8:04 AM Won Anonymous
LL$95,000.00 1(0) 5/28/08 8:04 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$76,800.00 1(0) 5/27/08 4:32 PM Lost Anonymous
LL$70,000.00 1(0) 5/28/08 5:32 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$40,000.00 1(0) 5/28/08 5:04 AM Lost Anonymous
LL$37,500.00 1(0) 5/28/08 2:38 AM Lost Anonymous

The prices are still silly, IMO, but I'm encouraged to see something actually close at under L$100k.

yep agreed with final paragraph regarding supply.

The concept is very good, but its far too overpriced for it is. I'd be more inclined to bid for a 1024s qm if it were around 30-50k mark and treat it as a part-sunk cost to place a satellite shop on.

One can't assume area is gonna have mega traffic and make it very profitable having a shop there....it might serve as a good promo for your main business though. Even if it did have good through traffic...going around an area of 22 sims (probably more later) full of shops becomes a bit tedious. I know i wouldn't have the patience....i struggle in large malls!

Maybe LL should have disallowed Resell (and made public beforehand) on each sim for a period of 6 months, thus help prevent the land flipping that is occuring right now. Nothing more horrible than seeing obnoxious For sale signs....not to mention the absurd prices.!

The biggest problem with doing that is that the sims don't know how to do it. There's nothing I know of that allows the estate owner to set the land to "you must keep this for X months or abandon it."

If SL can't do it automatically, that means that a Linden would have to do it manually and that's just not gonna happen.

Also, the flippers would just change to a rental system with silly rates.

It's so easy its untrue....in the About Region/Estate tools in Region tab, there's a box that says "Allow Land Resell". I've had to perform this function a couple of times at the request of my residents i.e Group land, going away on holiday, did not trust partner!

It takes only a few secs to do and applies whole SIM. LL know the closing auction date for each of their Bay City sims....requires minimal effort to tick that box after 6 months. Less effort than finding a prim that is the source of a griefing attack!

What do they do once the 6-month anti-flipper stuff expires?

Or do you want people to have to hold Bay City parcels forever?

edit: ok.. I think I see what you're saying.. If land prices remained high, you'd just be putting off the problem for 6 months, though. There's still no way to tell SL that people can't sell for 6 months after they buy.

Its too late now...LL should have announced it at the beginning of the project, so all potential buyers would have been made aware what the conditions were prior to making a bid.
Flippers might not have bidded for those plots .....remember there are groups of land Flippers bidding against one another thus spiking thosee prices........great for LL, not so great for an end user that wants to utilise the land in a meaningful way!

If you look now at Bay City plots, there are several businesses that have bought plots there--Blaze, SLAB Designs, TRU textures etc.....there not the kind of buyers that would walk away after 6 months....they're the type that will be ther for the long haul...i.e form part of that community.

It's not too late for future auctions, though.

My point was sorta that I don't think it makes sense to do since there isn't a way to disable land sales from the day somebody got the land. You can only turn on/off resale at a sim-wide level.

Agreed, and they are not selling all the plots of a sim at the same time, but over time. I am pretty sure Docklands is all sold now, but I am less sure about any other Sim. Bits and pieces at a time.

All sims should have been unticked as soon as they landed oon the grid....and manually ticked on the 6mth anniversary date of auction close date.....that is not very hard to manage! It's a once only function!

well set to the close date of the last auctioned plot on that sim (so its approx between 6-7 mths), its still not hard task!.....or alternatively to the 1st closed plot date (approx 5-6 mths then)

These are piss easy admin, even for LL staff !

But it's unfair and wouldn't really help

Say they did do that at the start and scheduled the sims have resell enabled in late November.

Somebody who bought today would be locked in for 6 months.

Somebody who bought in 3 months (if, say, the land owner defaulted or abandoned) would be locked in for 3 months.

In November, the flipper floodgates would open up. People who had decided to move on would sell and the open market would encourage flippers to jack the prices up.

What's needed is something that SL currently doesn't support: a way for the estate owner to say "you can't resell a parcel until you've owned it for X months." This was also called for, over and over and over, when First Land was getting gamed to death.

You are making it far more complicated then it needs to be. From what i gather these auctions will be over a month time span. The SIMS are placed on to grid with "Allow Resell" unchecked. .....either after the 1st plot or the last plot auction date on that SIM (whichever...does it matter?) you start the 6mth clock.

Some will be shorter and some will be longer...but its only by the length of the auction duration and when the plots are sold. So probably max diff will be 1 mth between 1st and last plot, if that!

I don't see how this would discourage land flippers. As has been said elsewhere, they're not going to care about the kind m2 we're talking about for Bay City - it's well into their tier noise.

With what you're proposing, you're either going to just shift the problem 6 months (during which the flippers will pose as renters) by turning off resell for that time or you're going to create a feeding frenzy every six months if you want LL to turn resell back off in 6 months + 1 week.