land prices.....

Have they dropped a lot recently, or has th land market been flooded? I've got 3072 on estate land, and haven;t been able to even sell it for 14,900.

I think I bought it last year for over $22,000.

What's a good reasonable price to expect for that much now?

I can't even give my estate land away.. I've lowered it almost daily trying to get a bite.

with so much estate land going for tier only, it's hard to compete. Someone tried to sell me estate land for mainland prices yesterday. I chuckled all the way to the market.

Well, I hate to just abandon it... ah well...least I didn't buy it for an investment!

There's nearly 15000 estate sims and i presume there are about 4-5000 mainland sims.
So we have nearly 20000 sims on the grid. At peak times theres 60k+ logins of which a certain percentage are bots. If you look the metrics of logins over different periods of time, i'm sure someone could make an educated guess of regular unique AV's. If i was a betting man.....i'd say about 120-150k regulars in any current month

The ratio of concurrent logins versus SIM numbers suggests 2.5 to 3 AV's per SIM at any one time during peak periods

There are 45,000 parcels placed for sale as of today. Mainland price per sq/m has just dipped under 5L per sq/m, that's the lowest i've known it

Basically there's an over supply of land, no two ways about it. Despite this fact, people are merrily buying more SIM's, especially Open Space sims with their eyes shut! Meanwhile LL is auctioning off yet more Mainland.............something has to give!!!

There's just not enough regular players to have a proper supply and demand market. We'd need concurrent rates nearer 100K for it to flourish with the current supply

(I don't "get" buying estate land, so my perspective is probably skewed)

It may take some time, but you can get almost every kind of plot and setting rent-only, so you'd always have to assume that whatever you pay for estate land is simply throwing your money away.

Your best bet is to convince one of your neighbours that they need more prims/land and sell your land to them. The people on the same sim as you are about the only ones your land is potentially valuable to (more so if the entire sim is sold out already).

If your tier is running out, take a deep breath and think before paying for another week/month. If it does sell, you have to subtract the extra week/month's rent, and if it doesn't sell you'll loose even more. Abandoning the plot to the sim owner can be the least costly solution, although that doesn't really make it feel less of a waste.

The way things stand....buying land or SIMS is a bad deal, unless you treat it as sunk cost and use it for your leisure...or place a Shop that can generate income. Aside from a few large Estates that know what they doing and can absorb an amount of unrented/unsold plots....the real Estate business has become a mugs game. I'm glad i stopped buying anymore sims way back last summer, even though i had a lot of different themed projects in mind.

Well, the reason to 'buy' estate is so you can turn around and 'sell' it, whereas, renting all you can do is leave. Also, in some cases (mine), buying the lot gets me a lower monthly tier, which is good as long as I dont leave. Unfortunately, I plan to move soon.... oh well.

I'm on mainland, and plots in my sim are offered at prices from 8.2 to 19.5 per meter. I was going to say they're selling for those prices, but they aren't actually selling. Some owners have taken their land off the market.

Thats correct Johan
People in RA have short term or selective memories. During the back end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 "buying" land on Private Estates was the norm...the Estate rental market was relatively small by comparison. At that time there weren't so much Land (SIMS) relative to logins...and actually finding available Estate land to buy was a real chore in itself (hence prices were a lot higher). Land scamming frauds were unheard of as it was so easy to fill up your SIMs with residents. I could buy a SIM and have it filled by the end of the week.....people would be falling over themselves to buy.

Up until mid or late 2006 it simply wasn't possible to sell estate land in-world, it wasn't even possible to let it be directly owned by anyone but the sim owner, group-deeded rentals was about all there was. I *think* Anshe may have charged for land even then (involved a payment through PayPal although I could be remembering wrong ).

I'm sure a lot of sim owners just love LL for adding that feature since it opened up a whole new way of tricking people into handing over money without actually getting anything in return and in some cases even outright scamming, but it was certainly not the norm in 2006, it didn't even exist for a large part of it.

Many people want open space sims I guess and are deserting other sims and mainland to get it, if you owned multiple islands, tradding them down to open sims would be a smart move I suspect. The balance of mainland being 2/3 of the tier of islands vs an openspace sims virtual sze for the same prim count is to be considered.

LL has intentionally and willfully devalued both Mainland and Estate land to unprecedented depths. Anyone who buys land now should not look to recoup their initial investment when the time comes to sell. There is a very good chance their land will be worth less and perhaps even worthless.

It's simple, really. They can't attract enough new customers to absorb all this land. They can't keep the new users they do attract because they never fixed the stability issues. Competition that can provide a better user experience will be coming soon.

Their strategy is clear: Pump out as much cheap land as they can and make money on tier. This decision is made all the more easy because they don't give a crap about their customers other than the money they debit from their accounts every billing cycle.

Of course, the other way to increase the bottom line is to raise tier prices. They would do it in an instant if they thought they could get away with it without crashing the market and losing the folks they depend on for their land use fees.

They won't get another penny from me, that's for sure. To get my money a company has to earn it.

The only thing LL has earned is my disdain.

/vent off.

I don't have any quarrels or quibbles with LL over land pricing. LL is a business, it nees to make a profit. We, the residents, are the customers. Nobody has to buy land. Lots of people have their SL experience completely for free - free basic membership, freebie clothes, hair, shapes etc. People can build a skybox or even a big sky complex and rez it whenever they like in a sandbox for up to 5 hours - now they can even do that at 4000m, way above most of the griefers and tricksters.

It depends, some very popular estates charge an upfront fee, people can benefit from having a presence there. Others work out cheaper long term if people pay an upfront fee so if someone is looking to stay for a while then it's financially more attractive as the upfront fee leads to lower tier payments.

At the moment though land is a huge factor in those profits, if they turn land into a white elephant those profits become harder to maintain.

Yes, I agree. But if that happens, market forces will dictate that tier will have to come down in price or some other incentive offered.

Right now, LL is churning out new sims every day. They are being bought for around US$1000 - less than half the price they went for the last time they did it. Then they are cut up and sold cheaply. People tend to go for new land because it hasn't been 'spoiled' yet with builds, so it looks good. They won't keep churning out new sims for long, and prices will recover a little. That's what happened the last time, but prices never got back to what they were before they started churning new sims out.

In the last couple of weeks, I've bought land in the sim where most of my land is for 6000/512, then 5500/512, then 4350/512, and yesterday I lost in the last few seconds of an auction when the piece went for 3010/512 (I was poised to bid again - stupid me. I should have raised my max price much earlier instead of waiting, but I didn't expect it to be bid on).

When LL stop churning out new sims, the prices will start to slowly go up again.

If you read my post again, I did say "back end of 2006" didn't i? I bought my 1st plot of Estate land in Sept 2006, followed by another in Oct 06 on Fairchang Estates.

During that period i bought several other plots on Estates and made profits by re-selling them pretty quickly.....a few thousand here, a few thousand there. With the demand at the time, it wasn't too difficult. So i wouldn't consider myself being tricked into buying at all, as i made money from it.

For sentimental reasons, I've kept my very 1st plot of land i ever bought in SL (was a 1/4 sim for 125k in Sep 06 !). Now on this particular land i expect to make a huge loss when i come to sell it........so reallly all those earlier profits from land trading have gone poooofff by this huge land devalutation!

I agree 100% in all of the above.
Apart from a few well marketed Estates (Caledon, Fairchang, Alliez etc) or treating land as a sunk cost purely for leisure or to use it for a Main shop.....owning Land right now is high risk. Renting land is defintely the preferred option for a variety of obvious reasons.

The market rate for land has been trashed by LL flooding the market.

I am afraid your land is priced too high for today's market. To give you a fair comparison, I recently sold a 2048 M2 double-prim parcel (as much prim count as a 4096 parcel) on a well-managed private estate, for a mere 10,000 L$. And I had trouble finding a buyer even at that price.

Like yourself, I had paid far more per M2 back when I bought it. At one point I paid something like L$36K for a normal 2048 parcel! But it was right beside a 4096 that I already owned, and I *really* wanted to expand my prim count. That was just before the land price bubble burst. Weeks later I bought 4096 M2 for just L$5K, in the same sim.

Based on what I have seen recently, you'll be lucky to get L$7K for a 3072 M2 parcel, even if it is beautiful, prime waterfront and faces onto a sea of OpenSpaces sims that are available for boating. There's just WAY too much land for sale on the market, and Linden Lab keeps on churning it out as if there was no tomorrow.

The private estate land market is changing rapidly. More and more sim owners are going to a "zero down, just pay monthly fees" structure. I have a quarter of a sim now on that sort of a deal. Didn't have to pay a penny for the land up front, and I just pay my fair share of maintenance costs each month. When I leave, I just pack up my prims and go, like any renter. I can't resell the parcel, but I have all the perks of owning the land as far as parcel control goes. As more sim owners apply this model, you'll see fewer people who are willing to pay anything at all up front for land in SL.

Market forces doesn't come into play, LL manipulates the market as and when it chooses too. (Same with Lindex)

Tiers coming down would have been the smart move to stimulate more land ownership, I've said this god knows how many times in blogs and forums. It can't be a bad thing lowering tiers and making it affordable for players who reside in countries that have lower average national salaries, hence disposable income!

Instead LL reduced the Estate purchase prices by around 40%, leading to many SIM owners losing out when trying to sell their SIMs. Instead of getting 1200-1300 USD for their SIM, they can now expect 700-800 USD...about half what the majority paid for!

The lowering of SIM prices is just dangling a carrot. Players not in touch with the SL land economy will buy regardless in order to furfill their own SL dreams.......even more appealing are those relative cheap Open Space sims. It's basically the Tier that LL are after... 20000 sims generating tiers are better than 15000....right? LL gets their full whack regardless.....its the poor sim owner that picks up the costs. If they try to offset some of those tiers by renting/selling land, that has just got increasingly harder when considering number of regular logins.

I'll be happy to see lots of cheap land.

Second Life was never meant to be about running your own virtual land business.

There was a time when land barons were considered scum. They were seen in the same way as the folks at the front of the queue at Best Buy that try to buy up all the iPhones in order to sell them on eBay for a huge profit.

But I've never really faulted the land barons. It was really down to LL to not allow the barons to buy all that land, or to at least make sure that they had a steady supply of land to prevent land barons from being able to take advantage.

So maybe they've finally managed to unclog their supply line.

Still, I'm not that confident. I think the main reason SL land has always been so expensive is because sims are expensive. So I'm not gonna get my hopes up too high.

If there were no Landbarons providing Estate land (like pre-Sept 06).....prices on Mainland would go through the roof even at existing levels of mainland sims. (Ugly chaos)

waterfront is still proving to be priced pretty high on the newest mainland continent. there are very few quality 512m's out there, and they are actually selling for L$10k+. 1024's and up are priced according to that scale as well, depending on whether or not they are near the oean areas. so it's not ALL the mainland. maybe just the grassy areas that are losing capitalistic value.

In a "game" where you can cash in the virtual currency for real dollars, people are going to be attracted to it for monetary reasons. Not everyone has the talent or software or marketing skills to be a content creator. Two years ago, this left the options of owning a casino, owning a bank, owning a club, becoming a landlord who offered rentals or a land broker who bought and sold land. If you had no soul, you could become an ad farmer. Lastly, you could camp for money or offer virtual sex for a fee.

What options do people have today?

No more casinos or banks (ad farming supposedly is against the rules now too). The rental market has been devastated by all the cheap new land available (a ton more rentals means lower prices, but tier remains fixed). The only people profiting from mainland sales are the bot runners and even they are taking a beating as prices continue to fall.

Even if you became a content creator, good luck finding buyers for your goods and services with transactions being constantly borked and LL themselves often sending the message not to buy anything. Many creations rely on scripts that no longer work since the last update.

You could own a club, but who would visit? And of those visitors, who would pay money to be there with no Sploders in the mix?

That leaves camping and escorts. Not a lot of fun or big bucks in camping. So pretty much, the best way to make money in SL today is to become an escort.

I don't see land as an investment anymore. I see it as a sunk cost for people who want to play around in a virtual space of their making. With the exception of Desmond and Anshe and a few established content creators whose offerings were not broken by the latest update, SL is no longer a place to make money. Unless you are the one receiving the tier fees.

Anyone else seeing a shift in the paradigm of the SL economy?