What's the logic?

I've been watching two ex-ad tower plots (256m each) that have set for sale since the ad towers were removed. They started in excess of 50,000L each and the description says that they are in a reverse auction type of thing, where the price comes down until it hits a level that someone is willing to pay. The prices have come down it steps but they also go up sometimes. What's the logic behind them going up?

Perhaps if the market looks good that week, they raise prices hoping someone will jump?

Maybe so - to the seller. It doesn't make sense to me though. One of them went up by over 4000L since yesterday. If nobody wants it at one price, it seems to me that nobody will want it a higher price, but that's just the way I think.

Maybe the thinking is:- if they imagine that a parcel's price is being watched, and it's lowered to getting near a price that the watcher would buy it at but then then price is raised, maybe the watcher will buy it the next time it gets near to an acceptable price.

proves add barons really were insane?

Don't think of it logically. Ad farms don't make sense and never did. Just wait until the plot is abandoned.

Are they 16m plots? (O.o)

I watched a few 16m plots in the region I'm in finally drop to L$100 and I scooped them up for my prim count on my pain plot. But, all the other microplots are still priced over L$700 each. (>_<

That, and, a 512 plot that is currently up for L$50,000, nothing built on it, and has age-ver walls up. (>_<

"Pay me to go away." Is the logic I see. (T_T)

Step 1 - Offer land at lunatic prices
Step 2 -
Step 3 - Profit!

Brilliant scheme -- meanwhile the owner pays the tier. Good luck to that owner!

(Sarcasm intended)

I know a bar that works a bit like that, they have a large number of different beers, if some beers don't get drunk/ordered the price just drops until people will buy, once people start to buy the price goes up and therefore the other beers available that were being drunk are now coming down in price cause everyone is now drinking the cheap beer.

Perhaps thats how that works here except with land.

The more land that gets bought the cheaper it becomes, the less land that gets bought the more it becomes.

Thats a reverse auction isn't it.

*waves to Larrie* Long time no see! Glad you're still around!

Yeah, I also noticed the reversal of reverse auction in a couple parcels on one of the sims where I have land. I'll bet it's the same outfit. Group CEO's profile shows him Founder of [trademark violation] "International Business"--which was formerly [trademark violation] "Investment Bank". And if you check the list of groups, it's practically a rogue's gallery of scams.

One of them is "the playing card of Capital Exchanges" on which the "advertising network" is listed, and his announcements on that site reveal a bit more of the writer's character than he might intend. On Nov. 8th, for example, he floats the idea of scamming around the advertising ban by using his inventory of ad-stripped microparcels to host client messages in parcel names and descriptions.

Another group is a laughable extortion attempt using larger (512) parcels, nominally reselling the very bottom of the BIAB barrel. (There's one of those on another sim where I have land.)

Yet another one holds Collected remnants of former adfarms. Despite being on sale for typical scammer prices, those parcels are described as if the group were performing some philanthropic public service. They even claim to have "Arbor / Clocktower probes." (All such probes were nuked remotely by the Clocktower network following the most recent adfarm ban).

Waves back

and still here

How many people would pay L$50,000 for a 256m plot? My guess is about 0.34 of a resident, at most!

Are they mine?

People buyd and own a huge total sum of land.
They wont pay less monthly fee if they would sell all their tiny parcels.
So they can wait for a high bidder for years, or just not sell it, because for them it makes no difference if they have the parcel or sold it.

Reverse aucrions actually make a LOT sense if the time factor is more important for the buyer than a bargain, for both parties. That is the case anywhere in sl where time is your most valuable ressource and almost anything can be copied.
People with huge ammounts of land also have acess to scripts and databases do automatically adjust ptices on ALL parcels depending on some stats.
So yeah. their reverse auction can change prices both ways.
Thats pretty usual business anywhere on a FREE MARKET.

Then Again, people who pay monthly for huge amounts of mainland are also these who pay the servers for all the free accounts, no matter if they use the parcels or not.

Ugh. "Bar-FTSE." They used to have a night at my local RL University where they did that and there would always be drunken students roaming the streets all night.

It's probably just a misguided attempt to apply the principle that "if the prices only go down, waiting is always the best idea, so people will" - ie, the same reason why RL stores put the products they want to get rid of on sale for one week, not forever.

It's funny really, I decided maybe 2 years ago that reverse auctions are the optimal pricing model for SL. I suppose I could be wrong but I've yet to see a better system. Running around trying to work out what land is worth by looking at it? That's for suckers, let the buyer decide what he's willing to pay.

In all this time no-one else has ever copied my idea even people who could do it easily. It's much like when I started using land bots to buy land. It took the rest of the market over a year to catch up.

I think I know who owns these parcels and I helped him a little in developing his pricing system. It's pretty new so I suppose he has some parameters to tweak before it's perfect. Even then it will be hard for outsiders to watch his prices in such a localised way and make sense of them. Maybe he's long on tier right now and is raising prices to slow the rate of selling. Maybe there was some small technical glitch. Maybe he's adjusting his model to optimise it and this is a side effect. There's all sorts of possibilities. The point is though that the price happens automatically so it requires a lot less manual labour AND, I believe, it's the way to get the maximum possible price on the parcel given a certain time constraint.

*edit: As for the theory that waiting is the best plan for the buyer. This might be true for beer but it only works for land if you know for sure that no-one else is going to buy the parcel. If you wait too long someone else will get it and you will get nothing. The optimal strategy for the buyer is to pay exactly what he thinks the parcel is worth.

and if someone buys the parcel?

It gives you more time to think and take a good hard look at what the beer prices are doing.


Trink Up

The "logic" behind the reversing of reverse-auction prices is that the seller doesn't want to sell below a certain stated threshold (which you can find in his business blog postings easy enough), so he "cheats" and occasionally jumps the prices back up to some high level to let them fall again, hoping no one will notice.

However, it's his "auction", so I guess he can use whatever rules he wants.

Sadly, one of my neighbors didn't understand the scam, and bought a piece of his land.

BAH! He should trust the system. All hail mathematics!

Possibly, but I don't think the prices ever drop below L$20/m2. So it could as well be a "random auction" and it really wouldn't make any difference.

Yeah, if that's true it's straight up stupid. If he wants to be sell for more then just slow the speed at which the price lowers so that it is picked up at a higher price.

Haha I know who you're talking about. He shitted up a bunch of parcels in Bay City to force neighbors to buy and remove the ugly builds.

Yeah, not surprised.

Of course, he is such an upstanding businessperson, in his own words, anyway.