Homestead Pricing to be Grandfathered if purchased before July 1st, 2009

Blog just updated in case you are affected:

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/05/26/good-news-homestead-pricing-to-be-grandfathered-if-purchased-before-july-1st-2009



Gomez

Having just seen this, I think it's a wise decision. Not as good as restoring the damages done, but a huge step in the right direction.

For all Caledon residents reading this ~ I'll be adjusting the covenant to remove the July 09 homestead rate hike accordingly.

Elanthius, it looks like you and I sorta gambled on homesteads and... didn't lose too badly (I won't say: 'won').

Just to echo my blog comment here:
I don't know what to say.
On some level, I am glad that I abandoned my openspace before January, and thus not eligible for the reinstatement offer. Otherwise I fear I would be tempted to have another go at letting LL jerk me around.

This is a relief; I have been scrambling around mentally trying to decide if I sell my Homestead or buy one to save on upgrade fees to a full prim (quite a few HS have been on the private market recently)

The upcoming price increase was definitely causing me stress since I could not accept the $125 price tag for the value you get with a HS.

Ok, that's great. Now we just have to continue to sit on our hands and wait for the June Age Verification/Mature changes before making any land purchases.

.

Yeah I guess so. I have 24 of these things and we're in a unusual upswing in occupancy right now but even in the rough times we were making plenty of profit at the $95 rate. Yesterday I increased the rates on my empty parcels ready for July and already rented out two of them. I'll probably just refund those guys and change their rent down now but it made me think that things would probably work out anyway at the $125 price.

The main thing that makes us the "winners" is that no new competitor can challenge our profitability over the next year. Presumably the number of grandfathered Homesteads will dwindle away leaving fewer and fewer at the $95 rate.

With mainland at an all time low (base price around L$2.7 sq/m it's a buyers market - i know i've been trying to tier down and sell my spare land as a result of the "adult changes/dollar exchange/vat/being evicted to ursula/next LL fad we dont know about yet", but having paid over L$10 originally for land, i can't bear to just give it away.

Adult changes + LL auctionining more sims = low land prices.

I think there will be enough spare land on the mainland after the mass eviction in June/July/August/Whenever it may be without LL dumping a load of new sims for auction.

Gomez

Cheap adult sims available, get 'em while they're hot.

And after a year, what then? The grandfathering (per their own statement) only lasts a year. What will the price be after July of 2010? $125 a month? More? More uncertainty there. And they should have made this decision a long time ago before so many homestead sims were dumped because they were doing these increases. Very stupid decision on the part of LL but then again have they ever been smart about the openspace/homestead thing anyway?

If we even get a year before LL decides to jerk things around again. While this change could be seen as an advantage (arbitrarily doled out to somebody who happened to act in certain, random - or at least undisclosed to the general public - ways), it at the very least underscores that LL is in no way predictable in its business decisions and statements. Grandfathering was *explicitly* not an option when openspaces were killed. I see no rational reason to believe that this announcement will not also be overturned arbitrarily in a couple of months.

Yep. And although we all kinda suspected this pricing moratorium might be coming, there was also the idea that the pending Ursula supply glut might be offset by some demand from Homestead refugees.

(Come to think of it, didn't Jack say something about hosting some Adult Content chats at various hours of the day this week?)

I'm pretty sure the words "Town" and "Hall" were used in the same sentence!

To me, this smacks of opportunism as much as anything. LL is not nominating a past date for grandfathering out of respect for the opinions of residents who made a commitment in good faith; rather, they are using an advance cut-off date as a way of encouraging more sales with the 'stability and predictability' of knowing the price won't change for a year.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I'm cynical enough to believe they're only doing it out of self-interest.

I don't mind them doing it out of self interest, business make decisions like this all the time and if it generates good revenue that's good for the platform as a whole.

However the associated balderdash and not even being able to get your spin right irks me. This whole fiasco started with a clear "No Grandfathering" and umpteen excuses for not grandfathering people in.

and you people believe them?
no doubt the are encouraging more people to buy these sims only to pull another bait and switch on them a few months down the road.
smells like openspace.

Sounds desperate to me. As others have said, "No Grandfathering" was pretty loudly stated throughout. Now they're going back on that, but it's only after a huge number of sims have been dumped. Also, a temporary grandfathering isn't really all that great.

As for me, I'm still glad I dumped my Homestead in favor of a grandfathered full. Whatever they do, this is the most per prim I'm willing to pay. That includes the normal price for full sims, and whatever absurd tag they decide to put on class 6s.

I remember too that they were very vocal about the fact that grandfathering is IMPOSSIBLE. Some impossibility, huh? This stinks to high heaven.

Pff, LL says anything they don't want to do is "impossible." They said leaving my pet JIRA, the megaprim hider, alone was impossible and had to be fixed immediately. They made it stop working in 1.23 alright, but they did it by simply stopping the hider from working rather than fixing whatever it was that made it happen in the first place. Office politics, s'all.

Gosh, I'm sure glad we got cleared and got rid of our homestead sim back in April, in part due to the pending price hike. Not too sure I want it back, now. :-/

First rule of business is that there are almost no rules. Nothing's certain no matter what anyone says. Markets, economy and all that.

The guess was that even if the price went up, there would still be demand for these things. If I were to be wrong, well, I'd ditch the regions then. There was no advantage in folding early, and at least some advantage in seeing what actually happened.

But Desmond your big enough to take some loss for a period of time, it comes out of some of your profit, so in effect no negative loss, if it fails you initiate change, and in all likelihood start going back into profit, you and a very few more like you. But the other 99% of Homestead owners who were just breaking even, calculated they make even less of a negative loss even by abandoning their homesteads. I would have liked to have seen a statement from you on this policy regarding that 99% of owners, rather than the 1% who can financially ride this out.

Whilst this is good news obviously in some ways, the thing that gives me a bit of cause for suspicion is that the end date for new purchases to benefit from grandfather is a future date (July 2009).

This means it's giving people an incentive to buy new Homesteads when the grandfathered status is only being 'guaranteed' (at this stage, and there are of course no guarantees as such) for another year. LL's point of making this change in the beginning was to drive down the proliferation of Homesteads, now they've realised this is a potential cash cow. If the numbers of Homesteads rise rapidly again and then the whole lot are hit with a price hike in e.g. July 2010, they will make a good profit from it.

It would have reassured me more as to their longterm intentions had the last purchase date of the grandfathering been in the past. Whilst they could of course equalise all the Homesteads come July 2010 at least it wouldn't smell so much of profiteering.

I am glad overall however to be saving some money on this, but I remain cautious...Homesteads still are not the great value they were at the start (a) because of the first price increase (b) because of the new limits imposed and (c) perhaps most importantly because of the uncertainty over their longterm pricing

Unbelievable. I can't imagine how angry some people that already dumped OS sims must be right now.

Leo, Eli: They are allowing people who abandoned their Homestead recently to get it back without an extra fee, though. I think that's fairer than picking (say) May 22nd and leaving the people who bailed early without that option.

Also, if they picked a date in the past they'd be accused of letting big land barons in on the deal, because that did happen once. They extended the deal on that occasion, so it's reasonable for them to preemptively extend the deal this time around.