Why waste land?

There's one thing that baffles me, and that is people who own land, yet don't do anything with it. Yet they continue to pay tier. Now I understand that maybe some are working on it, or they got sidelined and will get back to it, or whatever. But, well, here's some examples of what I mean.

A large inworld fashion source left Nova Albion well over a year ago, and has a large presence on their own island. yet they still have a couple thousand meters of prime, road facing, near an Info Hub land. They would be well served (I would think) to have a store location still there, or at least sell or rent the land rather than spending the tier money on something that you're not using.

Many homes in Shermerville, Blumfield, and West Haven were offered to new residents as part of the "First Land" policies. Some of their owners have not been back for ages. Yet their still getting changes for at least a premium membership on something they're not using at all.

A land baron bought many parcels in Bay City last year in the auctions, and has been sitting on them since then. They've lost interest in SL and are likely to leave, but they're still sitting on those plots without even a "for sale" price on them and no real plan to rent them out.

I guess my question is... why? Why do people sit on these things if they don't plan on using them?

SAS. Sim attachment syndrome.

It's where you fall in love with some land and can't possibly sell it for any reason even though it's nearly useless.

I've got a square meter or two of this stuff myself.

Spite.

I am in a very old sim and I have a few around me that havent logged in since 2005 with land and the same old build for four years. They have the tier on automatic billing and do not even see the charges. So it goes on and will be willed to their grandchildren.

.

Time travel.

It's amazing to come back every few months and see the world spin around you as if years had gone by.

I'm serious, it's quite entertaining.

Even more so when you have a patch of stability to stand on, while everything else rises and falls around you so fast.

In rl I have a Ferrari 308 and a Honda Civic . . .

Pep ( . . . but I don't use the Ferrari much - what's the point of commuting at 10mph average in it?)

During my tech support days I once had a customer who noticed after four years that my company had billed him ten euros every month even though he never used their provider service, just installed the software to try it out and then shrugged it off. Four years.

Yes, there are people like that who just don't notice they are billed for something. Sometimes, I wanna be one of those who don't need to care about every penny. *sighs*

Not to mention people who have land inside other peoples plots unused as they haven't logged in for 3years to recieve the offerers to buy it.
I suspect a lot may be lifetime members, Land forever stuck in time with junk on it. I wonder how many lifetime accounts were just alts.

I'm baffled by all this wasted land too. Among my near neighbours there's a small 128 m plot where the resident appears to have bought the land, rezzed a few random objects including a giant domino, and left - over 2 years ago.

Another bought his land at auction after it it was repossessed from a previous absentee owner - but the new owner's had it over a year and done nothing with it except rez a simple shelter when he moved in. Also there's pair of 16m plots that have been for sale at L$5000 each for over 2 years.

I reckon these are owners who have left SL but their credit cards have automatically renewed and they haven't noticed the payments going out. Either that or they've used someone else's credit card and that someone else hasn't noticed the payments going out.

512sqm of tier costs $9.95 per month
You can own 32 16sqm parcels with this much tier
Each parcel costs $9.95/month/32=$0.31 per month to own.

$5000/$0.31/month = 62months

Even in a worst case scenario of only owning 512sqm of tier it is profitable even if the 16sqm parcel for L$5000 sells in under 62 months, i.e. 5 years.

And if it's not profitable, well, it's $9.95 per month wasted, no big deal.

Yes, but I reckon it's more likely this individual has just given up. They bought the plots when they joined and their profile is blank.

I had a case like this recently. There was a large parcel next to my marina, advertised for rent, full of left over prims from passersby. This parcel was deeded to a group whose owner had abandoned the group. I wanted to buy this parcel from the owner but his name was no longer in Search. To make the story short, it turns out that the group had been abandoned for 2 yrs. so group tier had been overlooked by LL during all that time.
I submitted a ticket to try to get that land back into the market. Within a couple of days, a Linden came by and reclaimed the parcel.
I wouldn't be surprised if much of those parcels we're talking about here are in the same situation.

We have a couple of plots we've had to work around that are owned by someone who has never been seen. They're still active in world, based on their last login time (you can tell that by joining a group they're in), they just never visit their plots or respond to IMs offering to buy them.

In my sim, there are 2 adjacent 256m plots (a 512 cut in half) that have been set for sale to a specific person for about a year. The person who they are set to sell to sold his other land in the sim and left the sim altogether, so he was never going to buy them. I've tried contacting the owner of the land a couple of times, but with no response.

Also, I bought some land not ago that caused a 16m plot to become a doughnut hole. According to the land details, it's part of a network. I IMed the owner a couple of times and sent a notecard too, asking if he will swap for another 16m in the sim that I'd prepared. No response at all. So I put a ticket in and a Linden quickly reclaimed the 16m, set it for sale to me for 0L and set the 16m I'd prepared for sale to the other person. That was about a month ago and the other 16m is still set for sale to the other person.

Having done this myself, I can suggest one reason why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9AqVLWKIVo

(Summary: "Never" is hard to say.)

My partner and I each have 3 premium accounts from before 6/6/06. Each gets the free-with-membership 512m land as well as $L500/week stipend. We have all our land set to our group so we have almost 3400m of land that is technically free with our memberships, which also doesn't cost us anything anymore as the $L26000 we get for each account as premium a year more then covers our yearly membership fee. For a mere $15USD a month each, we could increase our holdings to over 6700ms.

Right now our land has a 6 prim sky platform on it where we can log in the once every other month we might bother to log in anymore. It beats logging into a welcome area.

It doesnt cost us anything so there's no reason to get rid of it. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be the only people who have their land set up this way.

If you want to call that wasted land, that's cool. Maybe one day when I hate Linden Lab sufficiently I'll abandon/sell it but probably not. If I did, I'd have to go thru the bother of trying to buy new land if/when Linden Lab finally sells this platform to a company that could be potentially less phucktarded.

But as far as I'm concerned right now, it can sit there with its skyplatform til the end of time. To you it's wasted, to me it's just part of my "free" membership.

Land has confused me lately...... I dont own any now or want to, but I have in the past. I remain premium because I feel SL is worth that.

Right now land to av ratio is staying around 2.5 avs per sim. To me that is the rediculousness that is SL. Yet I can forsee that average growing to less avs per sim, its what is pushed for everyone to do "Own your own Land!!" to mer its becoming "Own your own land, be a SL hermit!!" I own no land and still have a lot of places to go to. I dont feel left out because I no longer own land, what I do feel is tier free

Same reason that I have a gym membership I use every two months. I'd LIKE to use it more, but I never get to it.
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I'm trying to find the owner of a 256m plot that looks like it's never been touched. I need it in the same sim as our large plot and have the tier to cover it. I just need the prims (this is mainland). No response from him...any ideas on how to get his attention?

Offer a lot of money.

However, the person could have it so that IMs are never sent to email and doesnt bother to log in for months or years. Your offers may be falling on completely deaf ears.

You may never be able to buy it. It's the nature of the SL Mainland Beast.

As another anecdotal scenario: I had a friend who joined SL in 2003 and had landholdings in a sim that another friend had wanted to buy for years. The first friend died in early 2006 but the land remained in her name for more then 2 years after that until LL finally released the land and put it on auction. Why it took 2 years for LL to put the land back up on auction is anyone's guess as tier on that land would have stopped being paid very soon after her death.

I offered about 25% more than it could be reasonably worth, even at last month's pricing. Oh, well, I'll keep trying. Thanks.

No, I don't consider that wasted. Maybe underutilized, but not wasted. I'm talking about land who's owners haven't likely been to for months, and -- in the Nova Albion case -- are active on SL, but just let that land sit fallow. I'm sure they could sell those plots today if they wanted to, and for seemingly ridiculous prices -- but instead they sit empty.

A sibling of mine pays $14.95 / month for a WoW account that's gone unused since 2006...

This scenario is pretty common in online games and simulations.

One way to look at it is that they are people paying to keep SL alive, but not hogging up the bandwidth.

Same reason health clubs and Time Life books are still in business: They rely on people quitting after initial enthusiasm and being too lazy to stop their account from being debited every month.*

At least SL land owners can go to Elanthius and get money for their unused tier every week.

*Did not see your post, Nika. I am not calling you lazy.

Some of you might have heard me talk about my land.

My primary plot is 40k of mainland with protected water on the west facing side. It's mixed granite and grass. (the beach is granite.) It's also sloped from the water line to the road at the opposite end. But there is a fairly large portion of flat beach.

I've got the best sunsets in SL, and, I can fly or sail into them. Not generally possible off your typical estate beach.

Including the gov, who owns about 8k of road and the western strip of water, I have 5 neighbors. One has a 4k plot across the road in the southeast corner. One has 7k of the beach and one has a narrow 1k plot on the beach. The last one is a group with a 16m micro parcel (waves to Dave) where they keep their data mining script, which represents the only nuisance plot on the sim.

Most of us share our land in some way, allowing free use of it, or sharing it with others.

Over the years, I've bought out a mall, a few clubs and clothing, and poseball shops. Sweated over abandoned plot auctions that had land cutters drooling and just been a good neighbor who was willing to swap parcels and give free access.

But other than share my land, and build a little I don't do much with it than hang on it. I HAVE plans to landscape it someday--at least the parts that my friends and neighbors aren't using. But, I've been lazy about it.

But there's not much land like it out there--free of land cutters, good neighbors, protected water with sunsets and a road running through it, an interesting landscape that's NOT archiplegos. I'll keep it till it's a decision as to whether or not to eat that month.