Auctions

There is a parcel near my home that LL has reclaimed for some reason. It has an auction ID and shows up as purple on the map.

I've checked out the auctions site for the last couple of days and haven't seen it listed yet.

I've made the following observations.

1) The ability to search the auctions site for specific parcels is non existent.

2) There doesn't seem to be any way to see if the parcel is listed other than checking often.

3) Auctions only seem to be open for 2 or 3 days.

4) If I'm away in RL for a couple of days I may miss out on the opportunity to bid on the parcel.

Am I missing anything obvious? Any advice?

Thanks.

sounds like you've got the auction process figured out perfectly.

QFT

Yes, and unfortunately the fact that the parcel has gone purple really gives you no clue as to when it will be auctioned off.

I've seen purple remain purple for weeks.

I guess the trade-off for the generally-lower prices you can (usually) get land for at Auction, is that you kind of are stuck with whatever they decide to put up.

Don't get me wrong--Auction has been a good thing for me, personally. And it serves a useful function in sort of democratizing the distribution-of-cheaper-land situation (in that even the most prominent Land Barons have no real advantage over the little guy).* But there's no question about the inconvenience of not being able to plan ahead.




*or so it appears, anyway.

This is sort of a new phenomenon. For a long time, auctions would routinely run up a substantial premium over comparable land on the regular market. Although some parcels at auction still generate bidding wars, a lot of them go without any bids at all now. I think LL really wasn't prepared for the base price of even the crappiest Mainland to ever fall below the bid floor, but that's where we are now. In fact, it's so bad that even fairly good land will occasionally go without bids--apparently a lot of folks have just quit looking at the L$ auction page--and there are indeed occasional bargains to be found there these days, unlike before.

Would it be worthwhile to open a ticket? Maybe if you make up some sob story about how you need it for... blah blah blah, they will let you buy it before it goes to auction.

The auctions are processed in roughly auction id numerical order and LL seems to be auctioning about 5-10 plots per day right now. So find a plot with an auction closing today, TP over to it and get its auction id and then you can figure out approximately when the plot you want should show up in the queue.

I logged on last night to find that the parcel was no longer set for auction. The owner had changed to an individual (I think it was in a group before) and the acquisition date was several months in the past. There were several other parcels on the same sim set for auction before, that are now available for sale. A lot of them had very recent acquisition dates.

I'm guessing a group was abandoned or something and one of the owners was able to get Linden Lab to deed it back to them. The other parcels were probably sold or dumped to get out from under the tier.

Very interesting---I hadn't known that.


In re the price floor---though it would hurt me personally, since I'm modestly in the land-dealing business, philosphically I believe SL would be better served by having the base price of land be even lower than it is, now.

But that's a whole other thread.