Land sales slowing?

This month I've been using some of my spare tier to do a bit of minor land dealing, in an ethical way. As it's nearing the end of my payment period I decided it was better sell off remaining sale plots like quick, to reduce future tier.

Anyway, I put two 512 rectangles on sale at the cheapest level, undercutting any other 512s. Did the bots come? No - after 20 minutes neither had sold.

So is the land market really freezing up?

It sounds a bit like day trading, but month trading

Maybe the land bots are turned off just now because of the state of the land market.

I'm just curious, but would you mind sharing what your selling price was on those 512's?

Over a week ago I had to set a plot at less than L$3.5/m2 to trigger a bot buy. If prices have slipped more since as others seem to indicate, you may need to get near L$2/m2 now.

I think the 512s were L$ 1310 each. They did sell, but not to bots. One was put back on sale by the new owner at a slightly higher price.

Now I've got my tier down to thenext level down. I'm British and there were 2 £'s to the US$ a few weeks ago, now there's 1.6 - so SL is getting more expensive over here.

this week i just finally sold my last spare 512m for 4k... but that was to a neighbor. it was for sale for a LONG time, and i lost a lot of money.

Land sales _volume_ is always high, still as high as it ever was. Land sales _prices_ are low. Sometimes people get confused and think _volume_ has fallen when what they are actually doing is just trying to sell for too high a price.

I was just surprised that I was selling the two cheapest 512s listed and they still took half an hour to sell, that's all.

I also abandoned a 48m and a 32m lot. I'd made them out of 16s bought cheap. I reckoned if I sold them cheap they'd just get divided back to 16s and put for sale again, so I abandoned them to the Guv'ner. That way they'll be out fo circulation for a while and I'm interested to see how long.

I could have given them to Arbor Project, I know, I've done that before, but I was just curious to try abandoning. It was quite satisfying actually.

I know in my case I'm only paying very very low prices (2.15/sqm) for parcels like that because land prices are moving downwards so I'm being extra conservative. If you're not that low then you're waiting for normal people to buy it and I'd say half an hour isn't too bad a turn around for that.

I've watched a nearby 4096 sq m plot--over a month and a half--go from L$45,000 to a price of L$ 12,626, apx L$3.08/sq m. At which point, I bought; I was afraid the land bots would beat me to the property (it was adjacent to mine) if I hesitated much longer.

This is in a mature region where the typical price for land three months ago varied between L$ 7 to L$ 9 per sq m, depending upon whether it was "high ground" or "lower ground".

Interesting how things are changing.

Let's not forget that there's been a huge dump of small parcels into the market, in recent weeks, by the ad farmers.

Though they may have been cut up into 16m parcels back when ad farming was a profitable business, many were contiguous, and put back into 512's, 1024's, etc., when the ad farmers decided to try to get some cash for their land.

It will take a while for the market to absorb the hundreds of thousands of square meters that were dumped all at once.








That sort of thing worries me more than do the current land prices (not just in re the UK, but world-wide.)

Can any type of land be donated to the Arbor project or just small bits?

I'm still debating selling off some of my land to lower tier and I have a 1536 that is shoreline land that has a bit of water included and opens onto a Linden ocean. Rather than selling cheaply, I would be interested what the Arbor project would do with that.

Isn't it strange that people complain about land bots, but still facilitate them by selling off their lands for land bot prices?

It does seem a bit contradictory...BUT...I can see why it seems that way now due to (at least in the US) our economy going wacky, homes being foreclosed on, banks and the stock market being unstable atm. One of our regular forumites had to cut back by giving up internet connection for now.

That may not be the only reason some people are looking to tier down and need to do so quickly, but could be one reason.

Too many people are afraid to spend money on a pack of gum at the grocery check out, at this point. SL seems extravagant when you're being told we're on the cusp of another Great Depression. Once people see that the sky isn't going to fall, they'll come back and start buying land again, maybe not as much, but demand will stablize. The bots are off because resale is off. End buyers, those that use the land, are holding off in fear. Once things simmer down, even if the economy stays as lousy as it is now for a while, once buyers get used to lousy, they'll reevaluate, and come to see SL is a good value compared to DVD's and other, more costly forms of entertainment.

Ofcourse, LL could step in with incentives to land buying. I'm not talking bailouts, but perhaps a temporary tier drop or shutting down the land store for the duration of the slow down.

The reason this crash is different from prior ones is that all the rest were a result of oversupply in one form or another. This one is driven by falling demand.