Mainland value, after adult content moved...

No spin here, just a simple question.

Will the mainland's value go up or down *to you* after the adult content is moved off?

I'm going to attempt a poll here.

I answered more, simply because I had to go back to the somewhat infamous neighbors (an I mean "neigh" that I had. When they were there, well, who'd want to come to my home? I may not necessarily agree with the policy shift, and I harbor my doubts about it, but that was one example that would have been very different otherwise.

I would like to be able to invite friends and family to check out SL free of any stigma or misconceptions. Even though for the most part lots of SL is very harmless, the strong position taken by LL is fine with me. Virtual worlds are for everyone, with a growing youth market its an easy decision for the future of SL and vw's in general. Separating the adult content like this is really the only way that it can be access controlled, although actually policing the policies may be more than LL bargained for in the long run. What they have done is essentially exchange the former teen grid for an adult grid.. makes sense to me

-why

I am of two minds on the subject, so I can't answer one way or another.

Yes, it should increase in value because you no longer have to worry about the laggy black windowless BDSM dungeon free sex club & mall cropping up next door as your neighbor, or having a penis forest in your draw distance.

But IF this is just a precursor to merging the grids, then adult land is the only refuge for adults and the value of mainland to a large segment of people will plummet.

Also note that if land flippers go in and raid Ursula just to jack up prices, it may all just be the same, putting downward pressure on normal mainland prices due to increase in supply and simultaneously forcing adult businesses to just move to private islands.

The only way mainland value goes up is if there is a significant influx of people who want the PG views all over, and don't mind the private dungeons.

I can do less with it. It is more restricted. To me this lowers it's value, even though I do not currently make use of all the things I can do on it.

I thought the whole point of mainland was that it was unrestricted with no covenant. I'm annoyed that I now own the "new" PG and unrestricted land is elsewhere.

The million dollar question.

Hmmm. I don't know will its value to me go up or down, on a personal level, I think the mainland will look better with less porn palaces around, but what will appear in their place?
Could be a case of better the devil you know, but have to just wait and see, I think a lot will depend on how strict LL is with adult classification, if they go to strict the current mainland will loose value to me.

How do I think this will affect the overall value of land on the mainland.
I think the mainland will loose value due to the uncertainty of what will happen initially, until the move has taken place, then I think it will go up again in value, PG land is currently worth a little less than mature but not a huge amount less, so I don't see a huge affect over the long term, value may even increase if the mainland starts to look better as a result of the new restrictions.

I currently own mature Main land and live there, I am involved in D/s and in my home i act as i would in my RL home as a slave.

There is land for sale around where i am and in the sim next to me, which is PG, the land on both sims has been forsale for some time now so seems people are waiting to see what happens

I dont know about market value, but the way LL is going with the string of bendover and take it moves on the residents, i feel ppl are just waiting for something comparible to come along. How can something you use out of a lack of something better have any value at all?

Even if they want to target corporate and education oriented customers.. do you think those customers will remain forever ignorant on how LL treated the present customer base..
and do you think if the grand plan doesnt work out as rosily as expected .. LL wont **** over the next customer base just as blithely for the next brilliant plan?

In the long run reputation is everything.. the only thing LL has on its side atm is monopoly.

Hmm. . .I can't answer either of those choices.

Reason is, IF the Lindens enforce the restrictions properly--the way they SEEM to imply--then MY perceived value won't change, as, the change doesn't affect me personally. I don't run an adult business of any sort, and there are no adult businesses that affect the mainland I own.

That being said, I started buying up one sim that I mostly own in an effort to get things I didn't like off of it.

In my mind land prices will either stay steady or go down.

The measurement I use (average of 100 cheapest parcels >=512sqm) has stayed within the range 3.4/sqm-3.9/sqm through all of 2009. Through ad farming bans, land cutting policies, OpenSpace-apocalypse and everything else it hasn't made a difference. Prices are stable. So I don't think improving mainland or making it more attractive is likely to increase the price people will pay for it.

On the other hand in the past we have seen prices move sharply when LL print more sims. It may be worse now that estate sims are being cancelled, landmass is decreasing and global demand for land is stable or maybe shrinking.

A lot of it depends on how much land they print in the new continent and how they distribute it. If they print up 500 sims or more and sell them on the open market then we will probably see a decrease in land prices across the board. If there's too much land then prices in the new continent will be extremely low and normal non-perverted people will be tempted to move there due to the emptiness and low prices. That'll leave people dumping their existing land in mainland and a big scramble amongst land owners to undercut each other for a quick sale.

One thing it all depends on is how the great migration takes place. Let's say LL buy land from current owners at market prices, or somehow do land swaps that leaves large chunks of existing mainland in the hands of Governor Linden. In that case we naturally will not see an increase in available mainland and prices may remain steady. Of course then LL have to decide what they're going to do with all that land and the stability of the market will depend on how they plan to dispose of it. Auction? Info hubs? Miniature Bay Cities all over mainland?

It's going to be bad news for everyone in the land business if prices fall. Despite the vocal fanboys on both sides of the mainland/estate argument people will move to mainland if it gets much cheaper and estates will be hurting even more. Of course I appreciate that cheap prices are generally a good thing for the vast majority of people so you can put away your tiny violins.

If the mainland becomes clean of adult shops and adult content it will be nearly empty.
Just look at the lands now. There's either a stripclub, or other kind of escort whoreybusiness, or a shyop that sells whoreybusiness items and cheap junk that wasn't made with a real sense of art.

We leave with a few good sims that are good to look at, and easy to spot after everything is gone.

And lots of empty lands are cheap lands.

Lindens will probably give them away for free so somebody will at least make use of them in a good way.

The adult continent will be packed and lagged, while the mainland will be lag free, and empty.

That's what I suspect at least.

Given LL's track record of inconsistent and generally Kafkaesque policy enforcement the mainland most likely will become more difficult to live on, if you need to fear bans or objects returned for hosting a suspected orgy nest or BDSM dungeon.

The main question will be if the distinction public vs. private can be made obvious to all or if this is up to the whim of an anonymous G-Team member.

*I* would value it less, but I don't think prices will drop too far (depending on how strict their adult content policy is), but "Adult" continent land? OMFG it's gonna hit stratosphere levels in no time.

The change wouldn't affect me personally. If I want pr0n, I know where to find it.
It would allow me to show SL to others without the risk of something overtly sexual distracting them. People do latch on to certain things. Show them 99% non-sex and 1% sex. The 1% has a 99% impact.

The change would affect the price of any land that I wish to dispose of. However I regard the price paid as a sunk cost. It's the tier that concerns me.

Elan has a measure of land price by price/m of lowest priced parcels.
I have a measure of land price by walking about. What I take note of is the type of land coming on sale and its location.

I see large parcels in the old continents going yellow. Full sims or near-full sims are not uncommon. I put it down to long-time big spenders pulling out. Mainland is markedly sprouting big patches of Yellow. I don't know if the overall Mainland ( squares metres on sale *plus abandoned metres not yet in auction* ) is markedly increasing. I do note that high-quality land is sitting unsold at prices far below what it would have been snapped up for a year ago had it been on sale.
I admit that my picture is merely a distinct impression, and not the result of a set of database queries.

The only reason values will drop is because there is more yellow land added to the gridmap. Otherwise pretty much the same.

This is a hard question, and it basically (for me) comes down to how the Lindens handle it.

Will they simply put all the land that they receive in trade for X Island land up for auction? If they do, the supply will greatly exceed demand and prices will fall.

Will they do the wise thing and make land available as it is needed to keep prices fairly steady? Probably.

Since I think that a somewhat purified mainland will actually increase the number of people who join SL and stay, I think that in the long run, land values will increase.

Personally, substantially less. I have better things to do with my in-world time than to police my tenants to make sure they're not running something some moral crusader thinks might be "Adult" enough to get me suspended.

Overall? Hard to guess, really. It *could* tank the Mainland market even further, if they dump swapped land to auction too quickly (or, even worse, change the process to auction-off all of Ursula, giving a tier-overage allowance to those "invited" to move--who will then scramble to unload their existing Mainland before the allowance runs out, driving prices to Abandon-equivalent asymptote).

But it's also possible that folks will want both an Adult parcel and a sub-Adult parcel, maybe buying slightly more total area as a result, and thereby mitigating the decline to some unknown degree.

So it's a braver man than I who will speculate with "real L$s" on Mainland prices, in either direction.

I feel better knowing you were appointed as "Art Czar", deciding what is art and what isn't and what is a good use of land. God knows we can't let the free and open market decide.

The factor that would attract me to buying AO land - apart from the potential to present public Adult content - would be as a private refuge from possible swarms of gormless teenagers/immatures.
The factor that would discourage me from buying Adult land would be the distinct possibility of sharing a sim with a concentration of heavily- scripted objects.

The factor that would dissuade me from splitting holdings over a number of sims, whether AO or not, would be the as yet unknown effect of script memory being llimited bysquare metres owned in a sim.

If I were in the Adult content business/hobby, I would save my tier to maximise Adult land holdings and in a single sim. I'd turn my back on Mature/PG mainland and never look back.

I think that mainland value will not change substantially for most people. The only "problem" I see would be sites that mix adult and mature/PG content, mostly those being certain stores. Segregating them will hurt their in store sales for the PG items (i.e. clothing, beds, etc.). What if there was something like a teleporting doorway that you could walk through in a store that would get you to the "alternative universe". Shop owners would then need two presences, one on mainland and one off but perhaps there could be some accomodation made for them.

I'm not a prude and love nudity and the things that go with it, but sometimes it's a little in-your-face with what others do (not that I have a problem with that Jackie.

So it sounds like the best possible way for LL to maximize their profits in this would be to let the Land Barons snap up Ursula to resell at stupidly high prices which would then drive people wanting adult land into purchasing estate sims to flag adult instead of paying $20-200L/m2 on Ursula.

253 sims does not seem like enough.

In fact I own a small parcel with a skybox that I would want to keep as PG (except behind closed doors with the security orb enabled) and also rent a very nice place that I would hope stays adult-only after the move, since it has lots of, err, nice things to offer and I, too want to get away from the adolescents. Jackie.

You know very well what I mean. And I call art what I think is art, not what some idiot tells me what is.

And slutty brothels aren't my sense of art. But taste is personal. And I'm appointed as Art Czar? I wasn't notified of this. When do I get paid?

You can't stop the market. If the land is considered valuable then even if LL don't auction it you will see adult businesses moving in and immediately flipping their parcels to land barons. Let's say the land is worth L$20/sqm. You move some crappy failing club on a quarter sim in mainland to an awesome parcel worth L$320,000. Those guys are gonna sell out in the wink of an eye. Only difference is LL got nothing for the land and SexClub McGee is now US$1000 richer.

253 sims is suspiciously close to 5% of the entire mainland so I suppose it might be all of the new continent. Seems like that would be far too few sims and we could see prices there be very high.