Land Investment - Safe?

What would be the possible pitfalls if I'm aiming to begin buying and selling up to 4 sims worth of land? Is it safe to keep all land and earnings under one avatar/account? Should I spread it out and create a number of accounts/avatars? Has anyone lost all their land/money before? Can Linden Lab confiscate land or cancel accounts? Could dishonest avatars cause me problems?

Investment decisions in SL all boil down to one thing, do not put in more than you can afford to lose.

I think your first step, to give you the assurance you are looking for, is to look at the Terms of Service - this makes it quite clear what you own, and where the liabilities and risks reside.

Losing money on land is a real possibility in SL. At the end of 2006, there was a price crash when land lost two thirds of its value over 2 or 3 days. It has never recovered its value to what it was before the crash.

I don't deal in large amounts of land but one of the biggest dangers is that of making a simple error, like setting 4096m for sale at L$4000 instead of L$40000. A simple typo like that will be spotted by a landbot very quickly once the land is set for sale. It'll probably sell before you have time to change it and sales in SL are final and indisputable.

You should have no problems keeping it all under one account. In fact, spreading it around sends up red flags that you are trying to hide something.

What exactly are landbots and how do they work?

/327/7a/172826/1.html

This tells you pretty much all you would want to know.


Cue landbot fight thread in 5...4...3...2...

Edited to add:

To sum up the 15 pages which will follow this one -

Arguments against: landbots are slimy, evil and steal land from people who make mistakes. They artificially drive up the bottom price point for land sales by inserting themselves between a seller and a legitimate end-user.

Arguments for: the fact that some people are stupid and make mistakes is not my problem. It isn't against the TOS and the Lindens haven't banned it, so that makes it ok.

Landbots are hideously ugly, automated avatars, who scour the grid looking for cheap land, sometimes preying on the mistakes of uneducated residents. This is merely their cover, as in actuality they have been sent from the future to hunt down and kill Sarah Connor.

Not. Safe.

Well, odds are, if you are reasonably careful, you won't lose your land to technicalities or scammers.

But let's think about this.

4 regions? Mainland? That would be 195 USD/mo * 4, tierwise.

If you don't make more than 780 USD/mo *profit* off that within ONE month, you've lost money.


Alright, so, say you beat that stat, and make 1000 USD profit. You just made 230 dollars after tier.

If that took ten hours of your time, you effectively made 23 USD/hour. But let's get realistic. It's gonna take forty hours of your time, screwing around with all that. Yep, 5.75 an hour.

Remember, this is the good scenario... in the bad one, you might *lose* 5.75 an hour. Or ten. Or twenty...

Just saying. If your name isn't Elanthius, I'd stay out of the mainland land market until you knew it inside and out, were prepared to take it seriously, and had bowels of steel for when the bottom drops out.

Regardless, I was crazy to do what I do too. Good Luck!

Thanks to all for the messages so far. It does make me wonder how people actually make money from land?

Explore around in-world, Jot.

If you start small and make sure your business model works before you buy more, you're less likely to be unpleasantly surprised.

Once you get to 1 sim, the cost per prim doesn't get any lower beyond that. So there is no cost advantage to owning 4 sims vs. 1 sim.

Most don't. Or as Desmond said, they have to work very hard for it.

The simplest rule is : If it's not fun. Get out as quickly as you can.

Buy low, sell high.

Full sim flippers need to know how to time purchases, appraise land and juggle tier so they don't get slammed. If you motive is to profit on resale, be sure you are buying sims for under market value and be sure to factor in the tier fees.

I owned one mainland sim and sold it for a profit, but I needed to hold it for 6 months and wait for prices to rise. During that time I had to bust my ass to get renters to cover the tier for me. Without the rent, tier would have eaten up the modest profit I made in the end. It took countless hours to run this rental business, so yeah, if you don't enjoy the time you are going to have to put into it, don't do it.