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

I think that openspace offerings have really captured the hearts of many.

Give it time. I'm getting a lot of people coming to Caledon *from* singular openspaces - they get very bored out on their own, few visitors, and long for something community-like. That effect will benefit the mainland too.

Long term prediction: someday some form of light use region will be available for sale on the mainland also, to residents - not just as communal lakes or something.

I don't mind rock, snow, or sloping (I love sloped builds), but that horrible coral on the atoll continent has to go.

There's hope for me yet! Actually, I just do one or two plots at a time as a means of using spare tier and helping to finance my time in SL. It just about pays for the cleaning of the Egotherapy Centre!

I personally don't think it has to do with Casinos, majority of non-gambling
residents didn't like them, only time I went to them was to camp when
I was new and I tended to lose more then I earn.
My friend had for sale before she sold it to land dealer 45000m of land for
sale for 130k no buyers, she had even lower it from the 178k that been
there for few weeks.
Last year if she was the lowest price for that amount of land the landbots
would have snatched it within seconds.
Not now because things have changed.
If it was year ago it would sold within seconds for even 6L a meter.
There isn't enough buyers or those willing to spend as much as they
did in 2006 or 2007.
Landbots are even asleep, I use to love them if I had land I wanted to
dump quickly and see how fast they would show up.
They don't come around any more even for 3L a meter.
Most of mainland seems like it is for sale, only people who seem to buy
are land traders who try to inflate the price enough until another land
trader buys or they sell low to dump the tier and it seems like
this has been going on for while.
The regular mainland resident can't or won't pay for entire sim or even
half it seems. I have been observing it for while like last 2 years.
Thing have changed when they started releasing a whole lot of sims.
Only people who seem to be buying are land traders.
And no one wants to pay what they use too if they been around for
a while, too many of us lost too much money just want to keep the
spaces we have.
And those of us who already have land for our shops, private building sandboxes, communities, or homes established aren't interested in paying more for land.
There might be people out there who can spend endless amounts of
money in SL but they are the minority and market shows it by
all the land constantly for sale.
If I had unlimited means I buy up land not to resell but creating a mainland
community or for creative projects but I don't, the majority I bet are in the
same boat.
Maybe on television or mainstream media everyone has wealth, can buy, buy, spend.
spend but the majority of us regardless of what part of world we live in do not
have endlessly open credit to buy whatever be it in SL or FL.
People even in FL are spending less that was going on way before the wall street thing.
Consumer based economies are really feeling it.

Just to reiterate: What concerns me is really not land resale prices, per se. As far as I'm concerned, the more people who own SL land, the better, and if lower prices were to make that happen, great. As it happens, I don't think current land prices pose any barrier to entry for end-owners whatsoever; compared to membership (for 512s) and tier, purchase price is negligible for anything but the most select locations.

Indeed, I misread another current thread title to be "Why don't LINDEN let the land price drop continue?" and that got me thinking about what would be wrong with free land, or land even closer to free than it is now. Of course, with free land, people would just junk-up a spot then abandon it, moving on to the next free spot--which is not all that far from what we see happening on some inland sims of the newer continents now, where land is as cheap as it gets.

As a side-effect, the land is very sparsely populated. To Des' point: community is difficult to build when nobody's ever around. Not that cheap land makes this happen just because it's so cheap to own lots of it; no, high tier still discourages that. But land being so cheap compared to tier, I think a lot of it is stranded, as I've said, owned by abandoned groups or unfunded accounts long since replaced by alts with other land somewhere else--and the left-behind parcels are big empty holes where no avatar ever strays.

At the time they shut down whole-mainland-region auctions, the opening bid price was US$750 each. Before they were shut down some 30-40 regions had gone no-bid.

Yes, they probably could have sold them if they didn't have a reserve set, but that's just not the way LL operates. They apparently have a floor "setup fee" for regions that they would rather not sell at all than go beneath.