Land Business crisis ?

LOL

I get a kick out of your virtual communism posts!

"ALL AV'S ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"

with apologies to Orwell.

/me hums the Internationale, preparing for the chorus of former capitalists who'll be singing along, come Tier Increase time.

If they increase tier, I'm pulling Stalin's statue down.

"Figtree? How many divisions has he got?"

In the days when First Land was still an option, that argument might have a grain of validity to it. Nowadays sims are auctioned off/ordered by those with enough money - then spun off as partitioned lots. There IS no market control from LL, save what they charge as a base for sims. All the rest is set at levels beneficial to the sim owners.



Sorry, the vast majority of the mainland isn't worth the trouble of visiting.



I have been a landowner...and the experience was more frustrating than you can imagine. Insufficient land management tools, lack of any online support, and being forced to move when some fingersniffer moves in next door and rezzes a bunch of giant, purple flexi prim tubes that keep flopping into my house. Or sets out a fireworks particle cannon and disappears for three weeks. Or one of a dozen other idiotic things.



The mainland IS myspace...for SL.

WRONG!!!!

LL controls the market by determining how many sims to drop to auction and how often they drop them. Anyone who follows the mainland market at all knows this. But your posts are funny. Don't stop.

Okay firstly you don't even seem to know who makes and auctions off land in SL so that being said I doubt that you have ever owned more then a few sq meters as an end user in SL and even then it doesn't look like you know how you came about getting that so here are some actual facts.

The only person that auctions of land in Second Life is the Company Linden Lab. They set up the servers for both mainland and island sims. The mainland sims are sold as entire sims ONLY by auction and no other way. Island or "estate" Sims are sold on a per order basis. Linden Lab also auctions off abandoned mainland from time to time as some people for whatever reason abandon their holdings. When you buy pieces of land in SL on a new region you are purchasing from a middleman or baron who purchased the sim via auction from Linden Lab.

The flow of land and its scarcity or abundancy is controlled on the mainland NOT land barons or end users or land flippers, but by Linden Lab. There is no real supply and demand market because of this because LL creates the market and can make land very cheap or very expensive at will because of it.

First Land was removed due to people creating multiple alts and abusing it and the real only purpose of first land was to give people a cheap premium startup experience and basically people simply bought first land for a quick cash infusion. Anyone intending to stay put bought the first land from those around them. Over time though people decided it was easier then being a land baron or land flipper even to make a 789790707% profit so they made alts and bought the land for peanuts and put it up for sale immediately so this program was closed down. LL again created the sims and the land and LL was responsible for the existance of every single plot of this land and LL is the one who shut the tap off

There is only one entity in this game that has the ability to control the market with regards to the mainland and its Linden Lab. No one puts anything up for auction except them.

Well, there are many people who argue on this
Maybe you are right, land market might not be controlled by LL.

Only thing I know definetely is who can crash this market.

So now, we have to answer also this. Is it possible for someone who doesn't control the market, to crash it?

Crash?
I have this suspicion that the driver has taken theirs hands off the steering wheel and is using them to cover their eyes. oooooooooooh! Hope the road ahead is straight and fairly empty!


Not even the promised reclaimed land parcels are being auctioned.
A hiatus. Everybody watching and waiting.
The whole food chain is waiting for the Premium accounts at the bottom to eat some tier.

Make the tier more appetising?
Wait (how long?) for hungrier Premiums?
Land dealers to become landlords? - passing their lower tier/metre onto both Premium and Free?

Looking back over my last post, perhaps I was a bit unclear.
I never said anyone else but LL creates land in SL. I merely said that the land which was being created was being bought in large quantities by those who could afford the auction price for mainland sims, or who ordered private islands.
Those are the individuals who, in turn, take that land, increase the price to cover their own cost and generate a profit, and put it on the market.
LL's role in this closed economic loop is only to create more land. The top-tiered buying and selling which effect the majority of end-user expenses for virtual real estate are, I believe, MUCH more impactful on the price of land than whatever LL decides to do. LL's decision to dump lots o'land on the marketplace hasn't really had that much effect on someone looking for a place to call "home" in SL. It HAS had an effect on those who relied on the amount of land available to remain the same while they played the virtual real-estate game.
In addition, First Land was a great program for those looking to try out the land-ownership experience - and LL's decision to dump it was a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of setting limits or caps on land prices or even land ownership, they made the decision to allow the market to adjust itself - which it's been doing, but slowly.
Combine the high cost of the initial purchase of land, with the high cost of tier, and the almost-legendary unreliability of the client, the lack of customer service and corporate communication...and I now realize why I developed my glue-sniffing habit.

Actualy it has in my case anyhow when land was expensive because there were like no sims being put out I couldn't buy mainland land. I dumped my premium and rented/bought or whatever you want to call it from a land baron in a private estate. If the prices on mainland had not reached 20 cents per sq meter and were reasonable and what I would pay for a vanilla flavoured patch of green sim then I would have bought my land there when I need to expand, but the fact of the matter is that I didn't because the price was too high.


So yes the prices of land affect the end user base because most of us wont buy land for crazy prices because its simply too expensive. Paying 100 usd for a tiny sliver of land is not something that the average user is going to do. Its to expensive period. At the time that the mainland market was very expensive like that the estate market started to boom for the sole reason that people simply would not pay that price for mainland land. Now that the price is dropping on mainland sims the private estate market is very slow from what I can see and if I wanted to sell my estate land now and move to mainland I would not be able to do so.

The only reason why mainland is cheap now is because of the number of available slots and sims.

It impacts greatly every single person who bought a place to call home in SL in the last year. Because suddenly their land is worth almost 50% less than it was a month ago. Not a problem if they are not selling. Big bummer if they are.

I actually did not disagree with the rest of your latest post. And I haven't sniffed any glue since breakfast.

But the big bummer is the fact that they even expect to get out what they put in. If you are buying land then that money should be considered a loss automatically. Not an investment. So unwise. Even in the real world most economists will tell you that real estate is a poor long term investment when compared to many more proven and reliable investments. So imagine in a virtual world that is controlled by the whims of a company.

Plus it is no surprise. I seem to recall a blog post awhile back saying that they would be forcing prices down. So you have LL with the bubble in one hand, and a big pin in the other. Couldn't get any clearer than that. Well maybe they could have drawn some helpful diagrams.

My opinion? for what its worth? Is that LL is on the vurge of an economy collapse. I think they went too far with the land dump, and now everyone is right on the line of sink or swim - close to a domino effect crash. We may pull through this or we may not. But I wouldn't be suprised if there wasn't a single sim auctioned for the entire month of September...

Ooh land prices are going back up, I'm going to buy half a sim of mainland before the boom.

A crash is what happens when an economic bubble pops. I bought most of my land (save for a few 16m2 plots I "bought the view" on) for less than 10L$/m2. And I have some very nice land.

Bubbles don't pop if they're managed correctly. In the UK we had a housing boom in the 80's and then came a severe crash.

Now we've got a housing boom again with very few people expecting a crash. They talk of a slowdown, but not a crash.

Boom does not always lead to crash.

How do land barons control prices at market? It looks to me like Linden Lab controls the prices by when and how much land they produce.

Since Second Life moved to the current land ownership and tier system, land has on average "retailed" for between 6 to 10L$/m2. There have been two land bubbles, both of which have popped back down to the land price range the LL has repeatedly indicated is their "target" number.

They don't control, but they definitely have a major influence. When they try to outbid each other and jack the prices of sims up, it raises the threshold level at which people buy - unless selling at a loss becomes the new black.

Hmm not in the UK they don't. It's viewed as one of the safest long term investments you can make. Hence the expression "As Safe as houses".

Historically with very little return when you factor in things such as cost of living and inflation, and of course you have to buy a new home at the higher prices too.

Sometimes you get lucky sometimes you don't as far as where the market is at when you are ready to sell. Sure a house that was 50,000 dollars in the 1970's will be worth alot more today but think about how much more everything costs today.

Thanks Nimue for spotting the blog post:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/11/short-break-in-mainland-supply/