Land market

Does the land market experience troughs and peaks in SL? If so what are the contributing factors and where are we at the moment? Is land selling or not, speaking generally?

Albion

"Does the land market experience troughs and peaks in SL? "
Yes.

"If so what are the contributing factors and where are we at the moment?"
Supply & Demand. ... as for where we are, It depends on what size peice of land you want. If you want flat or if hills are ok.

"Is land selling or not, speaking generally?"
I just bought some, so it must be

A Cronic Glut is more like it... A never ending supply of new Sim Land sucks out land value like a Volcano growing an island.

The land market experiences troughs and peaks like any market, but it tends to fluctuate around a specific value at all times. That value in my experience over the last year has been 20% higher than the best value of land you can get in Auction. Auctions sell a sim for US$1000. As the $L changes value, land prices have changed so that the average price of land still costs around US$1200/65536meter2. The 20% extra can be explained in two ways. Up to 20% of the land in a sim can be owned by Linden Labs when they sell a sim, and it costs about 20% of the cost of the sim to pay for a month of teir. On average the sim takes half a month to sell at average price with about 10% of the land owned by Linden Labs, so the 20% just means the average price of land leaves no room for arbitrage.

Land is always selling, but Linden Labs puts out unlimited sim acutions at US$1000/65536meter2 causing supply to be virtually limitless. They sometimes lag behind which creates small peaks, and land sellers sometimes get overzealous in their buying at auction causing a trough.

At the moment the spread from cheap to expensive land has gotten closer to the average price than ever before. Last year most land ranged between 2$L/meter-10$L/meter with an average around 4.6$L/meter2. The smaller spread we see now may be due to the transparent economic data now being avaiable to everyone, and sellers might try to sell closer to the average they see on this webpage that was not available last year. In general though, expect cheaper land in smaller peices with annoying signs, hills, or snow to sell for less than US$1200/65535meter2 most of the time. Expect larger peices of flat land next to water to sell for higher than this amount. With the average green peice of land selling around the US$1200/65536 mark. If you can sell enough sims in a month to offset teir and the sims not being a full 65536 meter2 then you will get a profit even from the auctions. Most people make their profit by being the first to land sold way below market value. Land for $L2.0/meter2 is still avaible quite often, but there are many people looking at the land sales list every few minutes ready to beat you to the deal for the instant 150% profit if not more.

Thanks for that reply Dark. I'll ruminate on it. The reason I asked is because I have some first land to sell as well as looking for a slightly larger parcel to buy. My land has been for sale a week and I've reduced it without really knowing how long it should take to sell.

Albion

The problem you're running into Albion is being in a "First Land" area. Your most likely purchasers above the L$4/m crowd would be your neighbors wishing to stay in the area and expand their holdings. You might want to try asking your closest neighbors directly.

The only true way to "get out from under" is to sell to people with large tier who then re-sell andcan take their time because their monthly payments are already high enough to "wait it out". When I released most of my land recently at L$3.5/m it all sold in the matter of minutes (I know, this is below market value, but I needed to tier down on principle and hoped the buyers would pass the savings on to others, after all it was 1 1/2 regions worth of land). Since you only paid L$1/m you should factor that into your price and how fast you'd like to move to a new area.

Thanks for the reply Clubside. The biggest oversight I think I made in buying my land was not to consider the fact that most of the adjacent land was up for sale too. It's in 1024 parcels. I have been hoping that would sell and the buyers would want mine too.

I might consider reducing it more. It's on at 2999 now after I reduced it from 3500 yesterday. The 1024 parcels around me are at just over 6000 now having been reduced. Your 3.5/m would make my land under 2000 wouldn't it? If I thought I'd be stuck here for weeks I might consider dropping towards that. Especially having checked my bank statement and seeing that SL is costing me less than I thought. I didn't realise that a pound was worth almost two dollars! I'm going to need about another 10000 lindens for the land I want though. How much do people spend on SL in the early stages?

Albion