Land Sales Search Change

Land ownership in Second Life has become a very important part of the metaverse experience for many people. The price of land parcels should be set by the condition of the surroundings, speed of the simulator, and value of the works produced by the neighbors in the parcel.

Currently, most users will simply pull up the land search box, select a few criteria for hunting for a parcel. They will typically start with the cheapest and work down. A large number of people play that search engine. We hunt for the cheapest land, grab up parcels as we can, and flip them back as the prices rise and fall.

Sadly, this feature causes a few problems. Sure, it makes finding the cheapest possible land easy, but its minimal nature allows it to be taken advantage of.

One of the issues is Land Bots. My personal opinion is that the bots actually help a lot of folks out. But I can understand the angst folks feel to loose a good deal right out from under their fingers. Real people take the time to look around a second. Check the lay of the land, what kind of neighbors their are, and that all so important SIM performance check. But a landbot will swoop in and just snag up that parcel without regard to others that might already be looking. The bot has no feelings, but it certainly snags on the very real feelings of the very real person behind the screen who just lost out on that deal. As such, popular opinion is highly anti landbot.

A second issue created by the availability of the search tool, is land fragmentation. Now, I know lots of people want to jump up and down and blame that on the ad vendors. And yes, if you buy a hunk of land near a protected land… You will likely find lots of ad vendors. But fragmentation deep inside nonbordered lands typically is caused by realtors who use loss leading to sell properties. They will fragment up a parcel into small units, oddly shaped typically, and then sell one for a very low value. Then price the rest in varying ways. The idea is that the loss leader might go for 10$l a meter, but anyone who buys it, really is gonna start thinking ‘Heck, I should buy those there too!’. And soon, the price is 15$l a meter for the entire parcel. We have all seen a 512 chopped into 4 or 5 pieces, all owned by the same person, and all for sale at wildly differing prices.

Imagine Second Life without a land search feature at all. Crazy you say? No, I don’t think so. When someone wants to buy land, they would have to search the classifieds. Not by price, but by content of the advertisement. Not only would it remove the exploitable holes highlighted above, but it would provide a thriving in world industry of Real Estate. Most would just start using those protected ways and find land by walking. Driving. Flying. And hiring real estate agents.

Without a tool to exploit, landbots would find it far far harder to buy everything. They could still be developed, but they would have to traverse from sim to sim, and examine each parcel.

Without an easy and free advertising method like land search, there would be very little reason to fragment up a parcel. Sales would be better done finding the proper person for your plot and selling it whole, or at most, chopped down into usable/functional pieces.

Classified ads for parcels would soon be dominated by the large reality companies that are willing to spend the most money to sell the most land. Savvy buyers would simply start looking around the sims they love. Instead of searching and teleporting all over the world, just go for a stroll down that strip of protected land, or roadway. Take a fly around the sim your buddies own land in.

And many would start hunting down real estate agents to help them find the land of their dreams. Plot values would be created by the condition of the sim, and not the prices the landbots are swooping in at.

Remove Land Search completely. Find land by getting in the world and FINDING land!

That is certainly an interesting idea but I do think most are interested in price, size of land, and location. This sounds like it would just make the land buying process more painful.

One of the issues is that land buying is not painful. Couple clicks and anyone can find the cheapest piece that fits their needs.

But... If there was no search... Folks would have to get into the sim. You would start at places you liked, and start wandering. Those protected lands would get new life and use as people used them to traverse sim to sim hunting for the perfect spot.

Realty agents would naturally spring forth to help. And there would always be multiple folks you could dump land to at a discount.

Today, if you want to dump land fast, you just put it up for a few cents per meter lower then the landbots are grabbing at. It will be gone quickly. But this just furthers the bot owners. Even though folks know whats gonna happen, and hate those bots, they will do it anyhow. Instead, to dump land quick, you would IM/Email your favorite realty group and the land would disappear just as fast.

Removing the land search might sound like a hinderance, but it would actually create jobs and improve land values in many sims.

Although you talk about land fragmentation, I got the impression that that was a distant second to your issues with landbots.

To me, LL seems reluctant to update the TOS to make something illegal if they can't enforce that law. Rather than people making various suggestions to hobble landbots with delays and removing land search and etc, etc, I'd rather they just made it a TOS violation to use a landbot and go from there.

If the botbarons who say that bots are fine because TOS doesn't disallow them are not full if icky brown stuff, they'll pack up their bots and go back to old school buying & selling. If somebody runs one anyway, it'd be pretty easy to honeypot them. A few "you were warned and now we're going to seize all your assets" and I think the landbot issues would go away pretty quickly.

Actually, I find the land fragmentation the higher issue. Automated clients, such as landbots, will not go away. With the client in the wild, and open sourced, any bright mind can manipulate it to achieve effects like landbots. Creating rules to stop it that seem more like laws will not stop the issue. It will only make coders get more clever in the ways they try to circumvent those rules. I believe that the a good reason Linden Labs is not plowing thru with lots of TOS changes is due to the near impossible nature of policing the issue.

Removing the land search though would eliminate multiple issues.

Discuss further. I will sit quietly, listen, and nod my head.