Land Value . . .

I find this puzzling. How is it that we can speak of the value of SL land when LL is constantly adding sims to the grid. With a (virtually) unlimited supply of land, doesn't that make all of the land worth the same (0)? Of course, LL is careful to mete out just a sim or two per week (I am just guessing at this), so it keeps the supply/demand ratio in check. I would love to know their strategic plan!

Sorry to have bothered you with this . . .

Well, RL governments keep printing money, but that doesn't make its value zero (in most cases).

The idea is to grow the supply of assets at a rate that roughly matches population growth (after correcting for many other factors). This is one of the things the Lindens have to balance. Not easy, I imagine.

What I'm not clear on -- and it has direct bearing on your question -- is whether the land sold in new sims is entirely First Land, or does some of it get sold to the highest bidder. Can anyone shed some light on this?

The vast majority of the land in new sims is sold at auction, only a little bit is set aside for First Land. You can check out the ongoing auctions at http://secondlife.com/auctions

Philip has actually stated they want to keep releasing land at roughly the same rate as the population growth. Not at the same number of course, but enough to keep up.

Thanks for the information you guys!

I've seen the auction list, yes. But without a list of sims and their birthdates it's hard to tell what the balance is between First Land and auction land (for me, anyway), and what the growth rate is. Unless I missed that list somewhere...?

The Lindens should open a Bureau of Statistics to produce information like this. (Where do I sign up to do that?)

There seem to be about 16 plots per sim of First Land, of the sims that have First Land.

(The fact that I and other people wonder about all this information and want to know it in such detail is, I think a good indication of the fact that Second Life is such a rich and vibrant environment.)

Each new Sim tends to have anywhere between 8 and 24 lots of First Land in it, with the remainder of the land being auctioned off in parcels between 1024m2 and 16000m2. The First Land lots are usually released to buyers about 2-5 days before the land is auctioned - thus First Landers become the first residents of the Sim (and this gives them time to become hooked on the location and bid on the larger lots touching their own!)

For the past 4-5 months, the rollout of land has been 40-50 new Sims a month, in batches of 8-24 at a time.

Disclaimer: numbers above are from memory and not from any type of statistics I've kept.

Wow, Lisse, what an awesome post! Is that just what you've picked up from observing SL? That just makes me want to start a data repository even more. This is exactly the kind of information that should be centrally available and free to all. I wish I had known that about the timing of auctions (no mention is made on the auction faq: https://secondlife.com/auctions/faq.php) as I just bought a parcel of formerly "protected" land that borders my First Land from someone who recently bought it at auction.

As to the data itself: 40-50 new sims a month, if accurate, seems like *huge* land growth. And yet, land prices (see /16/0f/32958/1.html, and my sincere thanks to Philip for providing this data) remain at the high end of a band (avg. of L$4.0 - L$5.3/m2) that's prevailed since September of last year. To me, that's exactly where they should be, indicating that the Lindens are keeping up with demand but not outstripping it. (It's actually down to L$4.54 right now, see https://secondlife.com/land/index.php.)

And yet, and yet... the average land price in Philip's chart may not be an entirely accurate indicator, given the fact that the data provided "tracks land parcel sales between users in-world, and does not count the first land program or other linden land sales"

Certainly the First Land program should *not* be included in the calculation of average land prices. But the auction land is open to all residents, so it seem that some allowance should be made for that in the figures.

If I sell two 512 plots at L$1,024 each, that puts the average price of land at L$/m2 (assuming that was the only activity that week). But if I sold those same plots after buying them at auction onthe day before for L$756 each, let's say, that puts the average land price at just under L$1.74/m2. That's a fairly large difference, given the amounts involved, and I imagine the markup on land like that is similar or greater.

Including First Land and auction data in the weekly economic stats would also give a better indication of how much money is coming *out* of the economy in each period, which isn't really indicated anywhere in Philip's data. But that's a topic for another thread.

Thanks everyone for the great thoughts and information that came out of this thread. Especially about the release of new sims.

Does anyone know if / how the Lindens announce new sims being created? I would be interested to know where they are tending to add to the map.

The Lindens have almost never told us ahead of time when new sims were coming online. Usually we find out by logging in and seeing new sims on the map (or by someone else doing so and posting to the forums).
As far as where, the last 9 months or so alll the newer sims have been moving slowly to the east and the south of existing sims. Nobody knows for sure, but I'd look for the next batch of sims to be somewhere bordering the "Lakes" or "Canadian" sims area in the far east.

I kinda like it that we don't know where/when new sims are coming on. Keeps us on our toes.

Wish I woulda known about that auction timing thing once the sim is there, though.