Auction Action Takes a Breather: 'Bout Time or Keep 'em Coming?

There's a serious recession going on in the land market and LL don't know how to slow that recession.

I see a lot of people saying that lower land prices mean more people will buy land, I'm simply not buying that because the ongoing tier costs put people off. The slump wouldn't have been so severe if it was merely a matter of the upfront cost of land ownership.#

I had pie for tea!

thats the risk...and it is his own fault...land speculation is just that. speculation...

personally i own my 512, which is combined in a group with my partner's 512 and one more plot...so we have 1536 m2...it is plenty big to do whatever we wish and gives us 351 ? something prims...yes our neighbors are close, but fortunately we are in a pretty old mainland sim and the neighbors are stable and quiet...

we bought when there was "first land" so we got the first two of them for 512 L$...and the third 512 was like 7L$ per M2 i think doing away with first land was a big mistake...thats where the "land barons" and speculators really took off...

but what do i know...i am not in SL to make money...its a diversion...a fun way to chat/interact with friends and toy with making things...

hope it turns out well for you...but i wouldnt put any serious money into SL...it isnt going to make many multiple Anshe Chung's......she got in early, got established, and made a lot of the profits early on by buying and selling peoples first land at reduced rates...i bet most of the income derived now is rentals...

but then again, thats also an opinion.

I don't think we mean the same thing by flipper... in my vernacular flippers do nothing but buy up a lot of the 5L land, jack the price 2 or 3kl and stick a bigger, brighter for sale sign on it. I have nothing against those buying at auction and setting land up and I've never thought of them as flippers

Only land and pie allowed in this thread no tea take that elsewhere

What's my fault? I sold my land at the peak of the market and now own a sim I have no intention of flipping. My concern is more for established residents getting screwed over by LL's market manipulation.

Not unless tier has been slashed by 50%.......

Someones still bidding, keep them coming......................

The dynamics of the land auction / land price control loop aren't well established, to me at least. Although LL has announced a reduction in the rate of auctions, it doesn't seem to have stabilized the prices yet. So, while it's "'Bout Time" for the current step, I'd kinda like to see the next step go further: a moratorium on new sim auctions till prices stabilize. (Perhaps in the meantime, auction of all the abandoned parcels can be completed.)

It's not that the current prices are necessarily too low, nor that it would be tragic if they fell further. Rather, I'm concerned that with as much yellow as there is on the map right now, we really don't know how much further prices would erode even with no new land added to supply.

On the other hand, the market is not in a panicked free-fall--at least some bidders still have interest--so maybe there's insider information that this is the last continent for a while. If that were the case, I'd favor making that public, dumping the whole thing to auction now, and letting the market sort itself out as some of the yellow starts disappearing.

One worry is the Yellow is growing faster ythan all the other colours combined.........

I did that last year ... and then it broke my heart to sell it when I had to move house rl ... and then I came back to the huge price hike and nearly keeled over.

I'm in the $40 tier for mainland, with something pretty for a group, but the whole thing is in the air cos the sim itself is very much in development. Would I like a region again? Yes I would, but given I am paying that amount for 1/2 an island I might just as well buy a whole island.

Anyone got a grandfathered one to sell? (semi-joke)

As if making money was a crime. Perhaps the the People's Glorius Republic of Second Life Revolution, could just ban land sales all together from person to person and make people abandon their land when they wanted to get rid of it...... then a carefully selected panel of socialist experts could set the price based on the needs of the working class. Oh.... and the tooth fairy and a big pink unicorn donkey would come buy to bring you tea and pumpkin pie.

I believe there aren't many real SL residents that even bother at auction. We all know (or at least suspect) that the current "auction boys" are just a manifestation of LL. Clearly, they are buying land at a far greater rate than they sell it....... the tier number must be over $10,000 a month and yet they continue to buy 4 out of 5 new sims....... and add another $400 of tier.

In an obscure and deceitful sort of way, maybe this is how LL decided to sell land directly to the "consumer" in smaller parcels. But if LL is selling a product and using a shill to drive the bids up........ well, then there is a problem.

Actually, we don't know this to be true at all and it's probably not. LL would not risk the blow to their credibility and there is no reason for them to cheat in this manner.

Here is a very insightful post that explains how the auction boys are able to buy so many sims and still profit:

http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showpost.php?p=417316&postcount=213

If they stopped releasing to auction, prices would slowly and steadliy creep upwards due to land brokers buying and relisting. When LL took a month off last November, base prices rose to $16 a meter.

Interesting idea but do we really think LL wouldn't notice it? I can see smaller users getting away with it but people who own a dozen (or more) sims? Seems like somebody at LL would notice that..

Well, but I think the system being controlled then was a lot different (a lot less yellow on the map) and with, I suspect, a lot less hysteresis in the loop. It's not that the land market would defy supply and demand, but I'm just not sure when and at what price point the direction would reverse if auctions were to stop now.

That secondcitizen post is very interesting, if that really can work at that kind of scale. If so, the baron's marginal monthly cost of an additional sim is only the cost-of-money for the sim purchase itself, not additional tier. It would seem pretty risky though: someday LL might wake up and start taking land from groups without enough donated tier--and half a continent could flip from yellow to purple in the blink of an eye. (... which might be a quick way to solve an over-supply problem. )

Bots would make it easier to move things around between groups.

If they are doing that, I do hope LL catches them.

Well as if there's something wrong with auctioning land when people want it? Perhaps it's a crime in your book. If some people are greedy enough to keep bidding on every sim offered when they have 20 they can't sell, that's their problem. No ones twisting peoples arms making them bid on it. There's enough land when peopl stop asking for it, ie bidding.
But hell no "we can't let an end user buy a sim direct, it's just wrong, we'll bid against each other and sell it at a loss rather than let that happen"
House prices low is better than house prices high in my book, I just sold my RL house when the market was down and it was $50k under 6months earlier, best thing I ever did, because I saved about $80k on the one I brought to replace it.

Still no new sims to auction. Mainland prices are already creeping up. Does not take long. I'm still not buying though. And a public FU to a certain land cutter with the intials RM, whose unrententing butchering makes hundreds of people's land lose their value and their pretty views.

I think after the weekend we will see a sim flood to make up for the lost auctions these past few days like Jack stated in the blog. Will we sink to the lower 5's?

Id like to see that. I'd even pick up a can of Redi-whip. ( for the pie, not the donkey) If ya paid big bucks for some land that is no longer worth what ya paid for it, welcome to the wonderful world of real estate. Some folks got all excited when the newb train rolled in with a bunch of people who didnt know land was way overpriced and started paying these whacked out overblown prices for it. Those of us who were paying 7 bucks for beachfront suddenly discovered our house had crash landed in OZ and prices tripled overnight. But if you look at the overall picture, you know damn well its gonna saturate sooner than later, and demand is gonna dry up. Real estate is timing, get in, get out. Until the day they say " the grid is as big as we can make it" and stop the auctions, and the influx of newcomers increases, prices are gonna stabalise or drop.

yeah, but as long as ppl bid on auctions they will never stop releasing them.
and i dont think it was a 'noob train' so much as 'that where the market was going'. i think most people that were buying land in mid 06 were still buying land in early 07.

The market wasnt going there, it was shoved there by opportunists. I bought a bunch of land starting in 2004. Two months before the price blow out I sold it. If I'd had known what was going to happen I could have waited and tripled my money. Oh well. But one thing I certainly wasnt going to do was buy land at 20 bucks a meter. You gotta be on crack to spend that, or.. be somebody who doesnt know any better.
And what I recall was...(takes a deep breath and rambles) a real estate price bloom caused by Anshe Chung making a million, her name in the magazines, the publicity causing the floodgates to open and the population soaring, first land went down the tubes, the Lindens raised server prices, everybody bitched about the prices so the Lindens decided to drop prices in a 'fire sale' on existing inventory, a bunch of folks with spare cash placed buy orders, and then the Lindens had to wait while the server company built machines to supply the demand. The real estate opportunists saw the potential for big bucks and jacked up prices accordingly. In the meantime all these newbies were looking for a place to live, had no idea what land used to cost, and spent wayyy too much for land out of sheer desperation of a place to hang their hat. As long as there is an unlimited supply of servers to be had, land is not scarce. Land that is not scarce is cheap. A temporary halting of auctions does not make land scarce, just means you gotta wait a bit. How many servers can the grid support before the technology collapses upon itself? Some would say 2000 less than they have now. But regardless of that, land will remain plentiful in the long run, as long as there is a demand for it or until some tech reason that prohibits expansion.

I stopped buying mainland land due to the price hikes and moved to estate land. Now in the past estate land was more expensive to live on then mainland land and I didn't like the idea of dealing with a third party, but no way I was going to pay any 16L per meters + so i started looking at the private market. I had one bad experience with a mini land baron but I only lost 2k lindens. The guy wanted to rent the land but use it all himself so he was just messing around with people and has since disappeared from the face of the earth. I hit abandon and went to the largest and oldest land baron I could find because I was worried about a repeat problem and I have been there ever since. Now my issue is even if i wanted to move to mainland which I would consider I would have to sell the estate land, but that's actualy pretty hard to do beacuse things have gone back to the way they USED to be and I dont want to move 12K sq meters of buildings either (so that's an influence) so I wil stay put until such a time as my needs exceed what I presently hold then I will sell up and start all over again, but I have a limit as to what I wll spend per sq meter and its not much above the 10L mark and there has to be something every special about that land and I have to be rolling in dough to pay that price. Otherwise I dont go for land worth more then 5-6L per sq meter cause that is what the market usually is before they stopped putting land on the market due to their backlog of private island orders

The way it's heading there'll be more sims online than residents, possibly is once you discount all the campers, stayonliners, campbots, searchbots, copybots, landbots, trafficbots & griefbots on the loose.
No wonder you can't find other people about....................

6 days later.....

Land for Sale Today
Residents With Parcels for Sale 7,374
Total Parcels For Sale 45,696
Total Square Meters for Sale 31,166,832/65536 = over 475 sims for sale right now

This stat only shows the total square meters for sale has gone down at 6 days later.

32,890,832/65536= (501,8 Full size sims)
31,166,832/65536= (475,5
-----------------------------------------

(26 "full sized" sims less than 6 days ago)