land prices.....

I agree, it would have been nice to open it up to all concierge members. Maybe if they see the demand for them they will change their minds...

Yeah I would go one myself, except, I think the rental / landmarket is in a serious crashdive ATM.
I'm tossing about tiering down myself, but I lose concierge support to drop an notch :/

Well, I'm selling all of my land as, other than live chat, there is no benefit to being a Concierge member unless you own a sim. I don't think there would be a crashdrive on open spaces as I know a lot of people are tired of buying a lot of nice land just to have someone move next door and build a laggy club. Open spaces would prevent all of that.

No unfortunately, no they wouldn't. Open spaces run something like 16 to a server. If the person sharing a server with you is utilising a lot of resources your open space suffers, this is why open spaces are named open spaces, they're not really designed for general usage, although many people find light use acceptable on them.

My family and I had a private Island for a couple of years. We sold it last year and bought half a mainland sim for about 88,000 L$. Would we take a bath if we sold that land now. Yup. Thing is we have no interest in selling. A huge chunk of the reason we got out from under the PI was the stress of trying to make our businesses pay for the difference between what we could as a family comfortably afford to pay in fees and what an Isalnd cost us. It was totally ruining our SL experience and in the case of one family member his health.

Now we create when we feel like it. Visit each other when the mood take us. Actually leave our lands to have fun occasionally. We DON"T worry about can we pay fees this month or did business take a hit. In short we got out of the rat race and are much happier people for having done it.

Because we are only spending what we can afford we can ride out the Asset server garbage and land crash. We can ride out most things that come down the pipe in the future and still enjoy what we are doing.

Is there still money to be made in SL? probably. But it is one heck of alot harder than it used to be to do it. IF SL becomes a stable platform we might well see another boom. But the wise resident enters into things doing what they find fun if they make money then great and if not its entertainment. The trick is to set a realistic budget and stick to it.

Why do we own land rather than rent on a PI. Because we like total control of it. I may build houses today and work on animations tomorrow. We might set up a home next week and car lot in a month. I may play with terraforming and natural settings. I dont know which way the interest of my 70+ member family will go from one week to the next. Mainland gives us the freedom to shift on a whim.

This is not the first time LL has screwed up land values. Won't be the last. Its not the first time there have been consistent stability problems either.

The only really good way to look at buying land is how much enjoyment do you get from it. If you love what it lets you do who cares if you recoup your purchase price.

My home would be light use.

Yes. That's generally the way Open Spaces have been used and promoted to date.
PI owners tacked them on as sailing/beach/wandering areas.
I have in the past seen space on open spaces being sold as "low prim" land.

The problem now might be that people will try to use them as they would normal sims - albeit with a lesser prim allocation per sq.m. - or as normal allocation engineered by the prim bonus.
That's got to mean that there's a high probability that at least one of the other 15 open sims sharing the hardware with any open sim will be loaded with scripts in an inappropriate fashion.
With a normal PI, you have a 3 chances of being lagged by another island that is sharing the same hardware.
With open sims, you have 15 such chances.


Add:
If prims are in short supply, what are the chances that people will use temp rezzers in an inappropriate fashion.
What have the Havoc 4 techs identified as being particularly hard on a sims performance?
-- temp rezzers!

The difference is this time I don't think the market will ever recover to the point where the base price will be higher than L$8 per meter. I have a strong feeling LL will continue to dump enough land to keep the base price at or below L$6 per meter with the potential for them to lower things even more.

It's all about maximizing tier fees now more than ever. The upfront money they get from Islands and Mainland auctions is just gravy.

That may be LL's plan since each user will be paying them tier and if they don't, they just reclaim land and auction it off to someone else to pay that tier. I doubt LL will ever drop tier cost.

Yep- thats what i have been saying everywhere....i guessed it was 20000, was not sure of the Mainland element. I presumed it was 4-5k though.

Whatever the figure in that region......the whole Land issue has become pure madness.!!
20k of sims with 60k logins (amybe 50 after Bots)...just doesn't stack up!
For 20k sims.....one would need 100-120k logins for the whole thing to flourish. Also explains why so many Malls are struggling as the population is spread out making it harder to draw traffic to single points. LL are clueless!

Yep which is why I say you get land because you want to do something with it. Resale value is irrelevant. Enjoyment or usefullness are really the only reliable factors.

When does Bay City go to auction? The prices there will be more than your average bear.

From the May 8th blog entry: In just over a week, auctions will begin for the many attractive parcels in Bay City’s first twelve Regions. Ranging in size from about 512 square meters to nearly 2000 square meters, the parcels cannot be terraformed, joined or divided by their owners.

Personally I don't think we've hit bottom yet, or it will come up for quite a while unless they pull a lot of new REAL residents in from somewhere.

This has all been very interesting. Especially Desmonds post. For a long time now, I've thought of Desmond as the voice of reason, and the visionary who can see the best course of action in any situation.

If Caledon ever goes up for sale, I'm outta here.

Anyway. . .

I find it ironic--Everyone is complaining about lower land prices. But at the end of '06 up until the first land dump, everyone complained about the high land prices.

When I think about starting up a business in SL, I invariably wonder when the rules will change in such a way as to destroy it all. I've seen it happen to other people when ageplay, casinos and banks were banned. When SL started to collect VAT, and every time an update breaks something that some product depends on.

Go Desmond. You got more nerve than me.