Mainland

What is the general thought concerning the mainland. Has anyone else noticed that it is like, being abandoned slowly? In particular it seems to be getting more difficult to rent out residential sims, there seems to be an abundance of abandoned land at auction.
What do people think.
Elwood

Mainland is okay, but with the reduction in the cost of acquiring private islands, combined with the increased control, generally lower lag and much less eyesores and griefers ... it's pretty easy to see how the earlier trend towards private islands has just ballooned.

I've noticed a decline in both mainland and estate rentals so I don't think it's a mainland issue, it's a more a summer issue.

I always preferred the mainland. It just seems so isolated not to have anything beside you. And I rent a few plots now. And a new mainland sim as well, got that a few weeks back. As somebody said, the estate sims are just as empty. Falling land prices, too many new sims and not enough people to buy them. Should be interesting. Hey mainland sims are dirt cheap to rent if you can find the right owner to rent them from.

I prefer Mainland for two reasons.

One is that I have been burned for a lot of money by Private Estate owners in the past, and I'm never taking that kind of financial risk again.

Second is that, having a Premium account anyway, the free tier on 512 sq m makes it financially worthwhile.

When I first bought from a Private Estate owner last year, none (at least none I could find) were just renting with full ownership controls. It was the standard up-front buy and pay tier.

In the past few months, I've noticed more and more that Private Estate owners are not charging a "buy" price anymore, but just tier.

Tier-only, with no up-front "buy" price, would make me consider a Private Estate again, despite having been burned before. With no up-front cost, my worst-case rip-off scenario is loss of a month of tier.

However, I still haven't seen Private Estates, tier-only, that appeal to me yet. The reason is that the tier is still too expensive. It's two expensive for two reasons.

First, these plots seem to be rented only in large chunks. Now that I have discovered I can be happy with few prims, I really don't need a parcel more than 1024 sq m (or perhaps something bigger on open space, with 234 prims).

Second, many still seem to deviate to high upwards from comparable mainland tier. I do expect to pay a little more tier comparable to mainland- that's fine if I'm getting customer service and a favorable covenant in return. But if tier goes too far up, I just have to think, stick with my tier-free small piece of Mainland.

I don't know if Private Estate land rental is eventually moving toward providing the kind of product I'd consider buying, or if the economies of the SL land market will prevent it. Until then, though, I'm sticking with Mainland.

You're onto something with the smaller parcels Amity, but estates have a duty of care to try to ensure a sim isn't full so, for example, 40 or so 1024M parcels might be problematic. Then of course there's the issue of estate tier being 50% more than mainland, so rentals are likely to be 50% higher but at the moment it's most certainly a tenants market and some people are offering prices that appear too good to be true, which might well be the case, but I am obviously biased as this is my main business area

I'm a "die hard" Mainland person. I've rented land in two mainland sims with no issues whatsoever and have now purchased land in the sim I currently rent my home land in. This is definitely a wonderful time to purchase land and I only own the amount of land that I can comfortably afford the tier on monthly.

Plus, I like not having the "middleman" between me and the original land owner.

That's why I say I don't know if the Private Estate market will ever come to accommodate that for which I am looking. Though I don't know a whole lot about the land market it in detail, I can guess at some of the things that would make it hard for Private Estate owners to do a lot of smaller parcels.

On the other hand, smart people sometimes figure ways to make difficult things work. So maybe it will happen.

(Sarah Nerd did have some parcels that almost fit what I wanted, as far as size and pricing. The only thing I didn't like was the covenant. They were in the "Slums of Nerdville" and the covenant required trashy, trailer-park type builds. If it were a slightly better neighborhood, I probably would have done it. But then again, she previously had some cheap parcels in Nerdagra (?) Falls, and about two days after I snapped up one of those, she announced she had to close the sim because it wasn't profitable.)

50% higher tier isn't that bad, if it's on a smaller parcel. The difference between $5.00 USD a month, and $7.50 USD a month, isn't that big of a deal to someone like me. To me, I measure whether the prices are "close" in terms of absolute dollars, and not necessarily percentage.

True and people will find the extra if they like the parcel. I only mentioned the smaller parcel issue because as soon as I cut a 4096M parcel into 2 x 1024 and 2 x 512 parcels they rented out within hours whereas the 4096 had been sitting there unoccupied with no takers for longer than it normally would.

Mainland Forever.

Me too.

I keep my businesses on the mainland, my estate home linked and ready to move should yet another estate owner kick me out with less than one day's notice (twice this year!), and my fingers crossed that my Bag End build on an estate will stay where it is. If it gets punted, it's moving to the mainland.

That is my line in the Linden sand: own the whole island, be ready to see all your belongings in your lost and found, or stay on the mainland.

I've always lived on a mainland parcel, always paid tier directly to LL, and have never been tempted to do otherwise.

I love my mainland lands. I also enjoy some island life too -- but I have a home in a nice, out of the way mainland plot and a store in a nice somewhat centrally located mainland place. I like them a lot.

I prefer the older mainland, BTW - Sansara and Heterocera. The others don't hold much for me, especially the three newest continents. So much of it just seems subdivided and sold off little squares with no sense of a larger land mass. I do like the idea of how all these places connect -- and I dun get dat sense form the newer ones.

Mari

It's a little slower right now, particularly with Northern hemisphere summertime and with the deep slump in land prices.

But mainland landlords always have the advantage of being able to provide $100 more a month worth of prims, lower prices, whatever, per sim than estate landlords. We're not going away anytime soon. I think we all tend to excel or slump together, as Ciaran says.

I own both estate and mainland, so I don't have any major bias either way, except the mainland property is always more of a challenge in dealing with the surroundings. So that's where my pride in accomplishment lies.

Rentals are very susceptible to tastes and trends. Diversity is very revealing. I have 1 estate and 1 mainland sim that I have to turn people away from. I have 2 mainland sims that are slightly slower than usual but still pretty decent occupancy. I've got a few isolated properties that are super-slow that i'm about to bulldoze and re-do, and I've got 1 mainland sim that I just opened at the start of the summer slump, and is filling slowly. If all my properties were like the few dead ones, I'd have the impression that the rental business was useless. So if you're having trouble, don't give up; change it up and publicize.

--Avion

It's a shame, though, what's become of Sansara and Hetrocera, especially in the past few months, as the land-dicing operations have chewed away at the older continents with a vengeance. I'm really not sure what it was about the adfarm "ban" that caused this problem to accelerate, but the Atoll is really a mess except for a few precious unchopped areas (rarely a full sim in size), which are themselves just one land sale away from the Dice-o-Robo-Matic.

And it's very hard to get any kind of reading from the Lindens about what the heck they're talking about amongst themselves. As best I can read the tea leaves, they seem to be planning that future continents be "zoned"--which I take to mean that subdividing will be very strictly limited. And I think they learned, from Corsica and Gaeta, that lack of infrastructure doesn't help demand. (They may have thought that lack of the weird-shaped chunks that roads create would reduce extortion-dicing, but instead a lot of those sims are farmed "fencerow-to-fencerow," and Jack has mentioned adding some infrastructure to the failed-auction sims on Gaeta to see if that will help, when auctions resume.)

But whatever they do to improve new continents, it's bound to increase the "slum" effect on the existing Mainland, at least until they start paying attention to the problem. There seems to be just an inexorable drive to ever tinier median parcel size--it takes a hell of a lot of L$9995 microparcels to generate any sales to the extortionists, so their inventory is vast, and obviously there's no way individual residents can pay the ransom to glue the mess back together into something usable.

I don't think LL has the guts to do anything about it, frankly. It would require them to treat the Mainland as a business, instead of as the weird experiment in extreme Objectivist/Anarchist "government" that it's somehow become. No indication that M has a clue about any of this. So, as the Mainland "slumifies" and Linden Village is ringed by a siege of crap, my guess is that LL will eventually auction off "estate management" of Mainland. Then it will be a very different business, indeed.

I just sold off my Heterocera parcels (broke my heart), but continue to hold on in Sansara. I was able to flip the Heterocera parcels for a much bigger piece of land on a sandy beach in one of the newer continents.

The new place is owned mostly by a large group and themed as a resort. Freinded the owners and I have group access to all of their stuff and can build there as well. Hope it stays this way.

The rest of the Heterocera sim I was on was changing hands weekly (big parcels). Got tired of seeing one new get rich scheme following another.

I will never give up the Sansara land.

I am a mainland girl, despite the obvious drawbacks it is where you can really meet people of all sorts. It is where SL really happens. (No offense to estate peoples).

I won't ever "own" SL land again, I don't want a financial commitment to SL, and have to worry about selling something down the line. I'm strictly a renter now, and I prefer renting on Private Estates. Mainland is nice to visit with all it's wackiness, but an SL Home is a place I want to go for peace and quiet, away from it all.

Mainland for me. Tried an estate when I first came. Paid in advance. Owner couldn't meet the tier a week later lol. New group rescued the sim, good on them for doing that, but they changed the covenant quite dramatically. O well! I moved to the mainland.

In my travels in the last few weeks I've noticed; Lots of parcel churn on the mainland at the bottom end. Prices are cheap as, compared to what they were. Competition is fierce and SL realty firms are setting prices to reflect the current oversupply. Pity those firms that got it wrong, some of them are out serious money. It really is a buyers market on the mainland at the moment.

Exactly. It's a great time to invest in the mainland. Rent tier from (can't say the name, think ninja and Skye) and get the most for your money.

Hey Elwood.......Our private sims went on a slump for a few weeks.....But since last weekend they have picked up again.
I think Mainland is getting harder to sell. I have moved away from Mainland now, I prefer to give my residents my attention and I can offer lower tiers that LL.
Don't think I will go back to LAG hell in the Mainland. With obscene structures popping up around me.
Take Bay City aswell.....Don't think that was as much a BIG hit as everyone hoped.

It's still the case that *prime* Mainland commands a huge premium. The Bay City parcels, for example, and check out http://ld.auctions.secondlife.com/Scripts/ListingInfo.asp?LotNo=79447558 -- a single-primmed 512 in Shermerville currently bid up to L$38,410 with lots of pricier stuff (sitting empty) in the neighborhood. Much the same story in the other old Linden-zoned sims like Brown and Boardman--if there's ever a vacancy to buy there at all.

If future continents are zoned again, it could be interesting to see what happens to property values in what are now rare, exclusive enclaves like these. But clearly people are willing to pay an immense premium for Mainland ownership compared to Estate rentals, for a comparable level of "zoning".

i think many mainland people relocated to better/nicer mainland locations, and wouldnt be suprised if many actually pressed the "abandon land" button, instead of waiting/hoping to recoup 20-30% of their money if they bought in the L$10-12sqm days (tier vs landvalue is just to big).

Also the competition in the rental business has tripled in these last months , im sure.


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Mainland is okay; I have a little bit there myself - the comparisons to private estates will be hashed and rehashed forever.

Thing about private estates though, it's like apples and oranges... and sometimes pears, watermelons, and chilipeppers.

* * * * *

For example, there's your standard full region just out there by itself. Whole lot of those. Maybe you share it with some neighbours.

Second, there's your little group of standard regions, but just unimproved land - everyone sort of doing their own thing. A lot of times hardly anybody knows each other beyond nearest neighbours. This is about as close to 'mainland feel' as it gets I think.

Then there's the 'RP' areas where everyone kinda knows each other, and there is a sort of heirarchy or politics at play. Not a place you can just step into and expect to instantly fit in. Often times, it's less about land and more about who's there and what's going on.

Also the commercial side of things. Say you have a flagship store - you don't *live* there necessarily, but you are controlling the environment, the look and feel, the region performance. It's all about your customers. Maybe you've got 1500 prims there for building or whatever.

Minicontinents start to figure in, too. My own estate is connected up to a few others; at 4.5 million square meters (about 70 regions) I can assure anybody the 'isolated island' effect is quite gone. Try flying from one end to the other; it takes a good long while. By train, which moves reasonably fast, it's a good 20 minutes from Tam to Kittiwick, passing through cities, countryside, forests, towns and a mountain range on the way. Everyone is at least familiar with maybe 100 other citizens from the group chat channel. And we are by far not the largest out there.

Now, there are openspaces too - light use private Idaho's that when placed by themselves, are more compelling than the roughly equivalent 1/4 region, to most people. I've seen an *explosion* of these on the grid lately.

* * * * *

So my point - when people discuss private estates, I've noticed that sometimes people usually pick a type of private estate that suits their discussion.

Isolated islands when comparing to the mainland's connectivity, or overstrict covenant when discussing rules; that sort of thing. It's a lot like the labels 'liberal' or 'conservative' - both labels gloss over the facts so much, that the quintessential liberal or conservative may not even exist. Same with mainland/private.

Not all mainland is blighted or destined to be; not all private estates are pristine but snotty areas. It really is an individual situation every time, and *what* part of the mainland, and *what* private estate matter more than the generalities.

I've talked about this before. Some of those do very well, and I think that because they're zoned, they have a "look" about them, and in some cases due to good mainland location, they're gonna do well. It's the key to mainland, I tink.

Before Bay City opened, I was looking strongly in Nova Albion and old mainland sims like DaBoom, the color sims, and the hidden lakes area. They're good, established areas that typically have good neighbors and high visibility, and are truly "Mature" (as in matured, not in PG/Mature terms) plots. I picked my spot in Bay City in part because of the nearby road accessibility of Nova Albion, Luna Oaks, Shermerville, and even the Ahern Welcome Area. Also because of the future expansion including Hub Island to the north. It's like new land near a large, established city, versus the frontier wilderness of, say, Corsica (Though I suspect land near the huge infohub going up in Helfell will be of value).

Mari