Why is LL unwilling to sell land?

Okay, so, I see it all the time, and I've made requests myself. Some parcel of abandoned land next door that we'd like to own after John Doe's account expired. It's been sitting stagnant and unowned in the governor's clutches for months, so we contact a Linden, we're told to post to SLLM, so we do.

What do we get? "Yep, it's land alright. Yep, sure is. We can't promise it'll ever show up on auction though. It might, it might not. Best of luck to you though!" Uh, why on earth not? Another month or two goes by and its still empty and ignored. One parcel in particular has been this way for at least six months, and that's probably one of the young ones.

You've got residents eagerly waiting to pay L$ (money sink) or USD (depending on parcel size) not to mention possibly extra tier to own that abandoned land, but you'd rather eat the tier fees on it? I don't get it, why is it such a hassle to put a parcel of land up on the auction?

Is the auction system so badly written that you have to perform an incantation when the moon is full and sacrifice a newbie to make it work instead of taking two minutes to fill out a new auction form? (if so, there's no shortage of newbies, and you control the moon. ) Or is LL just trying to throttle the auctions so they they never run out of parcels to auction?

Some of them have been smaller parcels (like 512 or 1024). If these are slated to be turned into first land, then why not turn them into first land already so they can re-enter the land market? I bet there's enough abandoned land out there to keep newbies in First Land for quite a while, first land worth having too. Even that would be better than letting it sit and make us wonder if it'll re-enter the market sometime before Third Life comes out.

Newbie sacrifices? The horror!

Seriously Karsten, I'm gonna ask more about this...

Hello Karsten. Unfortunately, processing land for resale or auction is a manual process. It takes a little more than a couple of minutes to press a couple of buttons. But, months on end is not the turn around goal.

When we research the land brought to our attention, we have to confirm that the previous owner is in fact no longer inworld or has no stake in the land. Once the status is confirmed, we process the parcels. The reason we do not give a specific time for this to happen is because we do not know ourselves. That is why we urge everyone to keep your eye on the plots you have brought to our attention.

For your information, I am currently helping to process some of the plots that are 512m or smaller and hopefully we can manage our backlog and be more responsive to abandoned land in the future. As always, please bring plots of concern to our attention on the SLLM forum and we will do our best to process them in a timely manner.