Just when you thought you'd seen everything...

Anyone who bought land in the last few years and would like to recoup a bit of their initial investment would disagree with you saying this is great news.

Trying to figure out what makes land brokers scum. Maybe you could enlighten me.

What I find most comical about this decrease in VALUE ..... is that

now mainland is so cheap that the fake Armani Suit wearing Estate Barons who run around bragging that they can get 460$ US in Rent from their European Customers for Land that costs them 295 a month ...

ARE screwed!


because with low mainland prices people like me can rent out nice large lots for well below Estate net cost and actually recover the cost of new land in a reasonable amount of time.

its funny how their only selling point seems to be ...ooh but its a class 5 sim..haha

What they do not realize is that this is the INTORNETZ and My sims are all Class 9 !!!

Yes, on lowering tier, but they haven't done it yet and people have been saying it forever. With this economy though, are people going to spend a real life-size car payment/rent/heating bill on a game, when no one's really buying and putting back into it for them? For some it can be a hobby expenditure but that is not true for most people, I think.

Also someone has to have money to shop with and support those who ARE land owning shop keepers or content creators.

Otherwise, if they do not lower tier, eventually SL will be very empty and most people will sell goods mainly on XL Street, the same way real life brick and mortar stores are closing down and going online or under completely.

On land barons being 'scum' - I don't think they are, however some ARE a bit greedy and price gouging, and that somewhat undercuts the vision other people have of SL which is a very cooperative barter based society. (There might also be some stinging resentment felt by some if they remember being/feeling 'cheated' by price gouging at some point by a given baron.)

All depends how you see SL, too.

I think when I bought my first full, regular 512 lot it was about L$9000, which was around the cheapest you could get at the time (late 2006) - and it was roadside too, although the land baron had missed that and priced it the same as all his other lots in the sim! I'd be lucky to get L$2000 for it now, but I'm not complaining - to me cheap land prices are an opportunity because at some point they'll start to rise again! Whether I'll make use of the opportunity or not, I have no idea!

I asume they do, I read somewhere that the whole throttle is set up to slow down landbots.
offcourse landbot runners will combat this by running more landbots in a networked cluster spreading the teleports so they don't trigger the throttle.
btw the current throttle is 5 per 3 seconds, after the next roling restart it will be 15 per 3 seconds I think untill they fix the code to not count failed teleports.

All mainland sims are class 5.

That's exactly the way I see it going at the moment.

Careful what you wish for, the people you are calling scum pay a lot of tier and I see no rush to replace those tier payments, which at the end of the day is the long term cost.

I fail to see what tier fees to pay for renting/buying servers, keeping them online AND pay for a big support and developement team has to do with paying a random landflipper 10k for a 512 parcel just because they had bot to grab that 3k parcel first and immediately put it up for sale at 10k again.
Tier payments are recurring for sustaining the system, the initial land price that barons charge is nothing but easy money on their part.

If anything, I'd expect tier fees to eventually go UP to cover for more employees, bigger/better servers and include some inflation correction. Improved technology might sometime increase the benefits for tier-paying members, like an increased prim-allowance per parcel, greater sized sims, etc. But I highly doubt tier prices to go down. They're not exactly high as they are yet, but bills do have to be paid.

i am glad there are flippers and landbotters.
its nice to unload land the day before tier, and its nice to be able to dump scrub land on a whim. if you hate bots and flippers and think they are a rip off, you can always bid at auction if you think that will get you a better deal...

Oh, they do, but at the same time they're giving other residents a very good reason NOT to upgrade their account from basic to premium. A premium account is just under 12 USD a month, just over 7 USD if you decide to pay anually. On an avarage night out, people easily spend 5 to 10 times this amount, so the monthly cost isn't anything to stop them. But, as easy as it is to get this allowance, it's a serious showstopper if they see they're going to have to pay some land flipper another fee just to actually get a parcel.
To Linden Labs, it doesn't matter who's paying the tier: the land flipper or the resident. If land flippers want to have an X amount of land, then there's reason to believe that normal residents would be interrested as well. Land flippers are nothing but an obsolete middleman between people selling land and people buying land. If it's bad enough to make people not invest in a premium account, then it's time to get rid of the middleman, and now is as good a time as any other time, but now economics are in favour of ditching the middleman.

These times are the ones that makes me sad not to be premium

The only reason tier would go up would be if there continues to be no competition or viable alternative for the SL grid.

Right now they are able to command such high tier and give such horrible customer service because they are the only game in town. Tier is way too high as it is, and is the specific reason I no longer pay a penny for it.

It seems unfair for a land flipper to buy a parcel for 3k and reset it for sale at 10k, but if it does not sell at that price, they are stuck paying the tier on the land. And if, as what's happened, the market tanks, they are left holding a ton of land and can take a huge loss because of the monthly tier they carry. I look at them as speculators rather than scum, because they do take a great risk when they lay out money for plots of land.

I personally got run out of the business two years ago by land bots, but I still don't consider them scum. I guess I reserve that word for companies that promise one thing, take your money, and then don't deliver.

scum is a rather emotive word to use. What you're describing is fraud - pure and simple.

Unfortunately sometimes people are complicit in the fraud for many different reasons and a good fraudster will always take advantage of that fact.

The biggest bot runner said he is getting out of the mainland business last night. So he is right in saying the middlemen are going away.

In this case it means someone who forks out a ton of tier to LL will no longer be doing so and a million meters of land will be entering the marketplace over the next few months (he's not dumping it all at once because it would fully crash the market). Most flippers are already gone, so I think we will see land being traded at next to nothing pretty soon since there is no one to buy it, save for those rare end users who are dying for prims or land on a specific sim.

I don't know whether any of this is good or bad, but I do know tier is not going up anytime soon.

good. i've been thinking about reapplying for a 1024 on some waterfront somewhere. i can wait.

I did the math on it a few weeks ago, one of those "I just got to have it sales" for an ungodly amount can support a huge number of $2L/m sales and keep the average around 5L/m.

Wouldn't it make more sense to sell more product at a lower cost, in this case the product = tier? Than to sell almost none at a higher price? I'm too tired to say it better than that...hopefully someone can rephrase it in economics speak.

WalMart cuts prices, so can LL? Lol.

it's actually a bad thing that the speculators are considering leaving.

People may not like them, but they act as a buffer. Without them when people are forced to leave their land then their options would be severely curtailed. Either abandon or sit for months hoping someone will buy it or potentially go up a tier if you find something new that you love but don't have tier for both.

I remember reading a few days ago that 2 estates have closed and if the land dealers are also closing up then it doesn't bode well for any of us.

As always, if you don't like the flippers then don't buy their land. There's enough private individuals that are happy to extort your money.

Told you so.

Back when Zindra was first announced, I predicted that it would tank the land market, for three reasons. One, the simple fact of dumping another huge chunk of land into an already saturated market. Two, the uncertainty factor: What can I *really* do on my Mature land under the new rules? Three, the devaluation of Mature land by adding new restrictions to its use.

I'm off the mainland now, back to Basic membership, and renting from a private estate. I plan to stay in my bunker until the storm's past.

This is basically what's happened to the land flippers. Ignorance and flatout refusal to react to their market killed their own business.
The residents may still have to catch onto this. I have no idea how many residents actually follow the land market or read the forums, but seeing how many were completely oblivious about the creation of Zindra, this issue will take time before they catch on as well.

And while it's true that Linden Labs is losing their buffer in land owners, that very buffer worked both ways, by lowering the interest for residents for owning land altogether. In the end, there will always be people trading land just to make some lindens, but their margin has been lowered considerably, making it less interresting, so this buffer has effectively been sized down to more managable proportions.

I wouldn't even be surprised if some people are entering the land market right now, using unused allowance to buy just a hand full of parcels, and sell those again in a couple of months. They won't make enough to pay for their subscription, but it will be a nice extra on the side.

Considering the yearly tier fee is nearly always more than the upfront cost, I'm not buying this argument that land is too expensive to purchase. Right now you can get a 512m parcel for around five bucks and still people aren't queuing up to buy.



However if land flippers start abandoning then nobody is paying the tier. There is no big line of queue of people wanting to buy mainland, the map is full of cheap yellow parcels, the demand simply isn't there and that's partially because the tier fees are the long term cost.

Except for the times when you leave to wander around naked in public areas.

I'm not a dealer, so I'm not particularly worried about the price of land.
I just sold 7856m of double-protected oceanfront to a dealer for 8.25/m.
A neighbour has had a single-protected 8704m parcel up for 11.5/m for ages and no interest.

I'm selling to buy elsewhere, and pay a bit more than 8.5 but ......
- the sale money breaks the back of the new purchase price
- the low price for the double-front ensured a quick sale

The tier is the real cost.
The money spent on the old land was a sunk cost as far as I'm concerned. If I have to pay a couple of L$/m over the 8.25 for a more interesting waterfront parcel, it's no big deal.

I have a 6k and 4k single-protected oceanfront on sale for L$8/m. That's PG however, and some people are hesitant about that. We'll see how it goes.

This is a good time to amalgamate holdings into good parcel in a single sim. Not so much because of the price, but because of the recent surge in availability.