How can there be a good economic state when you offer free rent, and no one replies?

I've offered free rental spaces for quite some time now, and it's like pulling teeth to get people involved.

I've also had a land offer where anyone can name their price, but no one is really interested.

How can the economy be good when you offer free space to sell things, and a name-your-price plot of land and no one even wants to inquire?

The phrase, "you get what you pay for" works in reverse also, people don't think they're getting much if they don't have to pay for it. Try charging.

I do agree with you there to some extent. I have tried charging....

But I seriously don't understand how someone would not even simply inquire about FREE vendor space.

I also don't get how land doesn't get any inquiries when it's offered as 'name your price'
Land is land... (and this is actually good land) and if someone were to make any kind of offer, i'd consider it.

Well people are weird with land it took me a little while to sell land b4. Vendor space people dont often consider places unless they are high traffic area's =/. I know for a fact i'd be skeptical where i put vendors anymore =/. I sell tattoos as well as run republik with sable. We are working on making a shop. Alot of vendor places that claim to be "free" have screwed people around constantly moving stuff etc and it gets kind of aggrivating after awhile....

Where doyou advertise? I for one had never heard about this offer until now.

I've tried advertising land as "make an offer" before, and nobody made an offer to me either. I've found that the best way to solicit offers is not to actually advertise "make an offer", but to set the good land in question for sale at highly excessive prices. This actually causes offers to come in, in my experience.

Actually, to tell you the truth, this action just goes to show that the economy is doing good. Just think of it, if people were jumping on free rentals, and cheap land, it would mean that the People don't have much money to spend, and the economy is in a depression. Due to the fact that people would rather make an offer on exessively priced land means that the money is flowing, and is actually a good thing. In reality, you will always make just about the same amount of money with your L$ to US$ conversions as you will make more L$ when its free flowing through the economy and worth less to the US$, and when the value of the L$ droppsto allow a better exchange for US$ you will recieve less L$, but it will be worth more. Do you see the balance here?
Right now people associate free rent with gutter homes, and name your price land as "The land sucks and I don't want it anymore so you take it.." You just need to understand your customers thats all.

With the vendor space, it depends on a few varibles.

How did you advertise it? If you threw people notecards most will not even look at them and some will report you for spam. I don't care what the offer is, I personally will not deal with anyone who does that to me.

Whats the build look like? A lot of people are starting to get more picky about the places they involve themselves in. An ugly, dull, or laggy build will stop people from renting. At least it will for me.

Who are the other vendors? When I rarely go looking for vendor places, the quality of the other vendors are an issue. This is from shopping experiences of looking for something I want within a stream of junk.

Main stores typically have at least 90% of the sales. With P2P this is more so as it makes it easier. Tho now two of my other locations are really breaking that idea. The animation warehouse and Nomine.

The traffic number is a bit tricky. An extremly high one means its attached to a club, casino or camping chairs. In my experience, either of those usually equals few sales. An area that the only attraction is the shopping with a decent traffic number is far more abt to bring sales.

I just started giving out free vendor space and no one has declined. But I have contacted every person in IM when they are online. It makes it a slow process, but I think it's worth it. They then complimented the build (yay!) and seemed excited that I asked them.

This whole thing isnt about being snobby or something like that. Its about marketing and how you want your potential customers to see you.

Hm! I have never heard of this either!
If you want..I know 6 people interested in vendor spots!

Was it well advertised? Was it set "for sale"? Does it get high traffic? Would it appear in the Land Sales list if I checked for plots of that size below a certain price? Would a dollar sign have appeared on the map to indicate it was for sale? If "no" to the last two questions in particular, then I personally wouldn't have noticed it.

--
Dillon

It's simply because

a) maintaining vendors in multiple locations is extra work, and networked vendors are expensive
b) with P2P teleportation malls, and rental vendors in general, are increasingly ineffective.

Even malls in high traffic areas are usually a bad bet, since in many cases it's something other than the mall that's attracting people there and people spend all their time at the other thing. A good example are the rental spots surrounding The Edge - yes, The Edge gets a huge amount of traffic, but as far as I've seen, they all stay inside the club.

PRICELINE ...LOL

One thing about vendor space that I've noticed is that people tend separate vendor space from main areas quite distinctly, which really means they're unlikely to sell anything. That's why vendor space in a shop selling similar items is good, because people are THERE to see vendors.
The alternative is positioning vendors such that people might see them on their way to somewhere else, but that can be good or bad, good if done subtley enough, bad if they're in the way and you're forced to negotiate them to get where you want, because if you're heading for a club or whatever, you might be put off by them and not spend ANY money.

But eh, the current trend is for most free things these days to go under, would you bother with the hassle of putting up a vendor if it's just going to disappear when the land owner realises they have no money?

People see something free, and wonder: how is it possible it will still be there next week?

It can be a big investment in time and effort to set up.

All that could be destroyed at the whim of the land owner when he simply gets bored.

Also, tenants have needs. If there is no visible motive to get the land owner to help them (be it rent, a fraction of sales, or such) they really hate to even ask.



Sure, all servers are created the same. But some locations are better than others.

This is true that in most high traffic areas people go straight to the "event" and never blink at the vendors surrounding the event.

Try something like the experiment I've started here:

/invalid_link.html

where you can have a high traffic area and although seperated from the vendor space, traffic is driven to the vendor space. And this is non-camping chair/non-zombie traffic ... actual awake and alert people looking around.

In this situation you have high traffic to vendors but eliminate the lag.

soooooo directed traffic. Try it yourself. It will most likely work out for the vendors where I'm doing this experiment =c)

The problem that I've had with free vendor spaces is that just after I get everything set up and going fine, they tend to disappear.

All excellent comments and suggestions from everyone, thank you.

Personally, what Ive done:

regarding the vendor spaces: I have a cool lounge, nice atmosphere and chill music which only has an event on sundays. Sundays, the traffic hits between 2000-4000. Other days I either teach classes there, or just chill out with friends. Anyone that does know me (I'd say Ive met and befriended 300-500 people) has at one point been contacted by me via IM offering them free store spaces. There are only about 20 store spaces. I think 2 people have taken me up on it. I've also posted in the forums several times, and spread the word in the groups that I'm in. All I ask in return is that they are nice people, selling cool stuff, and will stop by to hang out from time to time.
(I am curious to know why public yard sales are completely filled, yet they get cleared weekly)

regarding the land: I have written out the full opportunity offering the land, my SL company, 2 clubs, and all rights and ownership of everything (even comes with 2 groups, promo materials, graphics, etc).. posted it in classified, on the forums
/invalid_link.html
, in my groups, and have informed my friends. I simply want to get out of owning land, not because the land is crap. I was hoping someone would want to continue my endeavors.... but if they just want the land and want to wipe the clubs away, that's fine too.

I'll continue my efforts. Thank you for the previous advice.

Is this one of the ads disguised as a thread that Khamon mentions from time to time, or is this just a plain ad not even disguised?

Back when I owned land I tried to get people to use it for free, to live there for nothing.

I didn't even get an inquiry.

People wouldn't even leave trash on it .

i didn't mean to turn it into a promotion.... just wanted to point out the fact that the land/clubs/and vendor spaces are run by me, and I'm a cool dude with integrity... I want to help people and want to have people sell stuff, but people seem to try to find a problem with it.... whether I rent the spaces for $50L a week (which I've tried), $32L a week (which I've tried), or free, people simply don't even want to make an effort to inquire, check it out, and sell their stuff.

I may be starting to see Khamon's oft mentioned adver^H^H^h^H^h discussion threads where they don't really exist.

In a setting like ours^H^H^H^H SL, where one of the principal activities is to make money or at least try to get people to "Come see what I made!" it can be difficult to talk about what matters to you without mentioning stuff like the name of your store and what you sell.

Is there more return on the investment getting set up to sell on slexchange, slboutique, and secondserver than there is using free vendor space?

Personally, I've found adding items to Slexchange and SLboutique is much more tedious than placing my items in store spaces... and I only sell $9 Tshirts....

that's right... $9 Tshirts...

come get em, only $9... for Tshirts