When are the tycons going to start selling $1L mainland?

Or could it be they aren't really selling land for $1L ?

Some people, when they see the "Free Money!" sign, will always get excited. Nothing you can do about it.

Do they get the tier fees for selling mainland? Hmm thought not.

of course not only LL colects tier everybody else gets rent, it's easy to tell rent is paid in advance and teir collect at the end of the month

I noticed certain rental places last year in 2007 were charging 1L to rent a place
but the condition was you had to pay them with 24 hours via Paypal the rent for the
month.
I didn't get then still don't. Unless it was away to draw in renters to look at the
land.
But good news if you look you can get mainland lots for 2L to 4L a meter if you're Premium.
Sure beats the prices that were going for land in 2006 when it was 10L a meter or more.

Do you pay tier to LL direct after "buying" this $1L land and remove the option for a resident to take the land from you at their whim?Hmm, thought not...............
Do you have a guarantee that as long as you pay the monthly dues the land you bought is yours till LL shut the game down? Hmmmmm thought not......................
Are you the sole controller of your parcel settings and arbitor on it's content other than LL? Hmm thought not............

Any reason or no reason clause



See above.



You have to agree to the terms and conditions before you're allowed to purchase.

The thing that irritates me about L$1 land sales is when they advertise it as such and you read through the advert and find out at the bottom that the cost to purchase is actually a lot more than L$1. You shouldn't be advertising the land will cost L$1 if you are actually selling it for more.

It's almost there. Base price is 2.9L/m2. That's insane. After what had been a modest climb a few weeks ago, it has reversed and is heading further south. Where it ends, who knows...

I think that what's going on is not so much land itself becoming undesirable, but mainland as a product competing against private estates.

Mainland is what, less than 20% of the total regions out there now?

If we put rental private estates into giant blobs, I suspect we'd have continents that would be on par with the mainland itself, just generally covenanted and more closely managed.

Overall growth probably hasn't changed much - just mainland growth seems to have been limited. Anyone do the math on this?

One factor in that drop might be: of all the huge tracts of land (ahem) held by ad farmers, pre-Linden-crackdown, many might have been kept off the market while the ad farmers nursed hopes that the Lindens 'didn't really mean it'.

And now that they have decided that LL really DOES intend to police the crackdown, they're dumping hundreds of thousands of square meters, hoping to realize some return on their investment.

Once the market absorbs this one-time dump, it will stabilize.

Ad farmers don't own 100s of thousands of square meters of land. There have been a few blips where someone has dumped a couple thousand square meters of 16s in one go but it's not significantly affecting the market.

I think the "problem" is the massive increase in private islands, mostly open spaces. There's been an explosion in newbie landlords renting these out at near cost and of course for the consumer it's a much better deal as long as they don't mind the possibility of their landlord going out of business in 6 months. And really, 6 months? That's like an eternity in SL so it's no big deal.

The crap end of the mainland market may reach zero but all the decent land will be worth decent money for a long time to come. A good percentage, say 50 or 60% of the mainland is really beautiful land that's as good as anything you'll find on an estate and some of the core sims are coveted like estate land never will be (30 or L$40/sqm, even L$100/sqm in Bay City) so all in all I think mainland has a decent future at least for the next few years.

For backup for my hippo servers, I can use a few prims from a very friendly forum member, but with the current prices I am thinking to buy a 512 mainland parcel after all. My free tier of 512 is now rented out, but might as well use it

FD did you really see land for 2 linden per sqm?? That is a mere 1000 linden for a parcel? The cheapest I saw was around 3 linden per sqm, but I could only use web search at this moment. But even then, 1500 linden for a 512 parcel is very low...

There are great buying opportunities out there, among 512m plots. Usually the very cheap ones are rock, snow, sloping, PG, irregular shape or next to something very horrible. But occasionally I find a flat, green, rectangular, mature one at these low prices and well, I buy it and flip it for a profit of less than L$100! I think that's fair because the seller probably needs that cash or is desperate to reduce tier, while the new buyer still gets a bargain. In any case the new buyer more than likely flips the land again!

Hey Conifer, are you going to be the new land baroness in SL?

Anyway, for me the location is not very important anyway. On the other hand, if the location is good, I could make a small satellite store with some holo vendors, so I am still doubting what to buy. Because even for a nice located parcel, prices seem to be relatively low. Question remains, whether anyone would visit the satellite store anyway

I monitor and report Grid growth on a weekly basis here http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/business-land-economy/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-8.html#post438696

As of yesterday total regions were 31445 Main Grid regions which breaks down as 26363 private estates and 5082 Linden owned (mainly Mainland but also includes help islands and a few special sims), so Mainland is currently c16% of the Grid. Mainland has been growing at a lower rate than Private Estates (and tends to grow in discrete chunks as opposed to gradually) . At the beginning of May (just as the New Land Store was opened) there were 20477 Main Grid Regions of which 15861 were private estates and 4616 Mainland (c22.5% of the Grid)

There has been no significant Mainland Growth since August when the new 79 region Nautilus continent appeared for the first time - It's still not yet publicly accessible but is viewable on the map (search for Nautilus , many of the regions are prefixed with this )


EDIT: oops looks like the Nautilus regions have been moved and are now accessible

This must be a big problem for LL now. They've got major plans for future Mainland continent regions, but they just won't be able to sell the stuff into the current market.

They may be tempted to gamble that regions in the huge new city will work like Bay City did, or that other zoned sims will command enough of a premium to make them raise at least some minimum bid at auction.

But if they do either of those, the market for existing Mainland will just disappear. Now, LL has a habit of undercutting its own prices at the expense of existing land owners -- in recent times most dramatically Estates. But this is a somewhat different situation: they're already at the floor, with lots of non-producing parcels. (Note, these are not the sims with lots of yellow, or even purple; they're the ones with lots of land owned by groups without tier donations and by accounts no longer paying membership, let alone tier.) Unlike estates, it's very difficult for them to simply shutdown Mainland regions, leaving holes in the middle of a continent, when the sims no longer generate enough tier to cover cost. (Even if they could, presumably they'd have to somehow "relocate" stragglers from the failed sims.)

If they bring the new city sims online any time soon, the effect on Bay City resale prices will be devastating. Although they've promised to bring some events into Bay City, it will hardly matter if fresh urban sims are at auction in huge quantities. For that matter, even new zoned non-urban sims will compete for some of the market that supports Bay City prices.

Not that I personally care what happens to resale prices--least of all the wildly unjustified speculation in Bay City--but somebody's got to say it. I *do* care, however, that LL can't expand Mainland tier revenue because now, for every sim they mint, a big share of an existing sim goes non-productive.

Had the adfarm policy actually addressed the root of the problem, things might be different. I'd guess that other folks are just a step ahead of me: seeing even the superficial improvements slipping away, and dumping their holdings out of hopeless frustration. But I've already ranted in another thread about my despair with the half-assed adfarm policy.

Qie, I disagree with almost every aspect of your post. Of course as a large (largest?) mainland owner I'm somewhat biased, but anyway...


For a start, every mainland sim that LL prints *WILL* sell. There's an almost unlimited capacity for land ownership. The initial buy price may drop, maybe even to 0 but as far as I know there has never been a parcel (at a reasonable price) that has gone unsold. I'm pretty certain of this because for a start, I'd buy it.

LL certainly will be creating more Bay City clones, they've said as much a number of times. Maybe the prices won't hit L$200/sqm or whatever Bay City went for but you can bet your bottom Linden prices won't go below 50/sqm for at least the first 100 sims. As for it destroying the rest of the mainland, maybe but I don't think the common man is interested in these extraordinarily expensive zoned regions and they'll make do with the super cheap mainland parcels until they've got their feet wet in land ownership and decided to invest heavily..


As an existing estate owner that has paid off the majority of the sims we bought already I'm practically gagging for a price cut, it will allow us to expand our range of products significantly.


This may or may not be true, I'm sure there is some non-producing land and a number of scammers pulling the tier trick but this is just because LL haven't put the energy into cracking down or reselling the land. If they did so they could solve this problem easily without any significant effect on prices. Meanwhile prices are hardly at a floor. You couldn't buy a full sim for less than $1000 right now. What's this? The exact same price as a private sim! Sounds like there's plenty of down and lots of room for up moves as well.


It's true of course that Bay City prices might fall if some competition is introduced but I hardly see that as "devestating". Perhaps to any speculators trying to make a "quick" buck in Bay City but for everyone else slightly cheaper prices will be an awesome opportunity to get in.



There's been no sign of anyone "dumping their holdings out of hopeless frustration". From my perspective the ad farm policy achieved a lot. For sure I was disappointed in it's limited scope but now we can see that it has essentially solved the ad farm problem. There are no more ads. Any stragglers are quickly AR'd by Arbor Project zealots and removed by LL in a reasonable time frame. All in all it's hard to see what more needs to be done to the mainland apart from perhaps a few who complain about the crappy parcel cuts in some sims.

I won't address each point one-by-one because I think at the heart of our disagreement is not different biases, but rather a matter of fact that neither of us really knows: how dire the situation is right now.

You trade a lot of land, so you see land moving into new ownership--apparently without limit. In contrast, I look at the L$ auction page and notice that parcels even at these bargain prices go without bids now, when such auctions used to command big premiums almost without exception.

And the amount of non-productive land is just hidden from us all. Well, not completely hidden: we know that (most) land for sale is covering tier (except for scams, as you point out), but the land that's just sitting idle--how much of that belongs to accounts or groups without tier coverage, not as scams, but just "fallow" and unreclaimed? It's simply unknowable except to LL, and I think they have every reason not to make it known: as long as L$ auctions go without bidders, what would be the point of proactively reclaiming non-productive parcels, until somebody shows an interest? So, my take on this is that even the current low land prices are supported by LL (actively or passively) withholding from the market a substantial share of existing Mainland.

As to dumping from frustration with the nerfed adfarm policy, it's true: I have no way of quantifying how many people are, like me, seeing Mainland much less attractive than they'd hoped would be the result. I know I'm days from dumping my holdings, but you're right: I have no way of knowing how many share my despair.

Hehe - Elanthius wins the thread!

I think this answers the original question of the post - tycoons will start selling $1L mainland when they buy it for $0L.

OK, agreed that nobody /really/ knows what's going on and we're all guessing. As for auctions, the minimum price on an auction now is 4.3/sqm (I think) and cheap land is L$3/sqm so that explains why some land is going without bids. It says something about LL that they haven't noticed this and reduced the minimum auction price yet but I suppose they will eventually.

Qie, please don't give up yet!

You have a good point about fallow and unreclaimed land - we normal citizens have no idea how much of it is out there, laying dormant without an active tier payer in that limbo between neglected and reclaimed. Another thing we don't know, however, is how much land has the tier paid for via an automatic withdrawal and the tier holder just doesn't pay attention to the charge from LL monthly. Hard to believe, but some people out there really do have more money than they know what to do with and don't pay attention to what they're getting charged for. I've met a few in my lifetime.

Oh? Didn't we see 3-4 sims not sell at auction the last time they had sims on the block? Maybe took a second auction to sell, but 3-4 sims went without getting a single bid. That was telling; there is saturation, to the point where not a single person would buy a new sim. If the price was 0 or close to it, then yes, it would be purchased.

Right, but that only shows that the starting price was too high. Someone would have paid something if the starting price was lower. And not 0, or L$1 or something stupid either, then and now a lot of people would easily pay US$800 or US$900 per sim without question.

The starting price is 750 now. It didn't even get a single bid. If a lot of people would easily pay that kind of money, where are they? How could 3-4 sims not get a single bid?

1250 isn't it? I could be wrong. My only evidence is this:http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/07/31/change-to-the-starting-bid-for-region-auctions/