What is the point of the Land Flood? what about us?

Stew,

Thank you for that latest post. I can certainly understand how you must feel in your situation. I can understand why you may have been so defensive, but I appreciate that you can see the other side in this picture too. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the land market in SL that prices can go up as well as down depending on the market laws of supply and demand - with LL controlling the supply (or lack of) according to what they feel is best for themselves and the SL economy.

I have no problem at all with the business you are in, Stew. I think some people are overly harsh towards your virtual profession. You are a businessman at the end of the day. I prefer to judge people on how they conduct their business, whether they have a sense of ethics and fair play. I really do not know you or other land traders well enough to say who does or does not possess such a sense to ethics and fair play. But certainly, the price you sell and buy for is driven by market considerations. Therefore the price you set is therefore not often a good barometer for this, and other factors need to be considered. But that is another topic altogether..

Me? I'm a Real Life Unemployed Person, struggling to find work, and who uses Second Life mainly as an outlet for entertainment and relaxation. I'd like to buy some land in SL to express my creativity in, but I find it hard to justify at current land prices. For me, a land price reduction would be sorely welcome.

I wish you luck in your field of enterprise Stew, and I appreciate that despite how difficult this must be for you, you can see there are others, like me, for whom this development is a positive move. In this way, land prices reflects the rise and fall of real property prices. Falls are bad for the sellers but good news for those struggling to get started with property.

Don't worry Stew. The market is good for buyers right now, but hang in there and I'm sure it will swing back in favour of the sellers - you're in this for the long-houl right?

Regards,
Steve

Oo nga eh.

This seems to be the prevailing metanarrative about SL: The "poor" average player might just manage to scrape together enough for Premium membership, and then must struggle to find affordable land. This unfair economic situation interferes with their ability to enjoy SL. Meanwhile, "rich" land barons come in and pour all kinds of money into the world...snatching up cheap plots of land for real money and putting it up for resale, buying entire sims for over $3,000, they must be made of money to afford such expenses on a game.

Consider an alternate metanarrative: The "rich" average player enjoys SL as a game or entertainment. Sitting in his $200,000 home in front of his powerful PC, he finds it an interesting challenge to get as much entertainmet as he can from SL without sinking any US$ into the game; his wife doesn't like him "always spending so much time in front of the computer on that stupid game" and seeing it show up on the credit card bills leads to uncomfortable confrontation. Meanwhile, the "poor" land baron logs on to SL from a $0.50-per-hour Internet Cafe in his third-world country. His risky decision to use his Christmas bonus to buy some land for resale has been paying off. Why, just last week he and his wife decided they could afford to put their son in that fancy $30-a-month private school if he can keep on doing so well in SL. It looks like they'll be doing even better than that! He looks over at his sister on computer 24, and his cousin on computer 17. With three of them now constantly on the prowl for undervalued land, the family's fortunes are changing!

LOL, just remember: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. We have little idea who's behind those avatars, or why.

This is very true, everone's situations differ in some way or another....

Rockwell, i rent land out and i have seen over 300 members pass through our estate. I think i have had 1 unhappy customer. That was due to confusion about the size of the house she bought.

I offer a very cheap service to AV's in their early stages, my rentals are about 3.64 $ per month, and i have dedicated people looking after the people renting at all times. Basically saying that i am allowing people great flexibility because i have both commercial and residential in seporate areas.... so in these areas they can basically do as they please(And they dont mix commercial with residential) .... If they want to increase their prims they simply rent another plot. No start up cost. Also they are not tied up in anything, they can simply ask for a refund and leave at any point.

Last month the business grew to twice its size. I constantly have to expand, at the moment i am running at almost 100% rented out , this means i have much more room to grow. I cannot keep up with the amount of people looking to rent from us(we even have a waiting list in some cases), and it is getting to the point where i cannot expand anymore as i am affraid due to the the discussion we had over the last 2 days (as my profit is very low due to the cheap nature of the business, i also have to pay other people).
Many of my tentants come set up either a business or a home and they get the feel or taste of land and they move on to purchasing, some people have stayed with me for long periods of time. I even have "Account" customersm this is due to the fact that our rent is cheaper than the tier, and also there is no start up costs, plus we support our tenants. If they need help we get right to it.

So i am not only offering the land i am offering land plus a personal helper/builder/couch as many people need help the first time they get into land, other people here about functions of the land and would like to know how to do the same thing. So our land managers literally look after the tenants and we are on call all the time.

This is a little about the business that keep talking about And the land i take pride in.

So if it's an ongoing business, the price you'll get when you sell is irrelevant because you won't be planning to sell, right?

Well there are other RL factors which may be forcing me to sell... but yes it is an ongoing business. I am at the point where i have made the mistake when i expanded i paid 16L/sm for almost 40K sm of land, a few days later i could have bought the land for much cheaper. The problem is when buying such big pieces of land inworld, you dont really have much of a say on prices, cause you land up buying land from people that are online for an hour or 2 per day, and just the fact that you are asking about the land means you are interested and they will not change their prices to re-adjust.

IT is just very hard to swollow that i spent so much money for the land and the value dropped so much from one week to the next its allot of land, lot of money that i could have bought a beer with but i chose to keep it in the game.

I know it was a mistake to buy the land at such a high price, but i needed to, otherwise i would be paying a tier for nothing, i also had to get the business going otherwise i would have no money to pay for the tier. I also dont speculate when it comes to land, so i normally pay market value.

First, my situation is as follows...
I am a relatively new player. I've invested some into the game (bought 20k linden for my wife and I to at least not look like newbies). Then I set out to make money inside the game world. My RL finances are such that I could buy an island and pay for it if I felt like it. But I prefer to try to operate within the confines of SL so that I can experience it more fully.

So recently, I wanted to actually have a place to call home. Land prices are, as many have noted, very high. I don't know that I was particularly bothered by that. I found that it is quite possible to lease land from the evil land barons and do so at much less than it would cost to pay for a subscription AND pay tier. I was about to do just that when it turned out a friend of mine had an 8K plot that he could shave 2k off of. I'm paying 500L/week for 2k and 200 prims. Don't know if that's a good deal or not, but knowing the friend, I'm guessing I'm getting a steal.

At no point did I become annoyed with the evil land barons. They are speculating in a market that is, in my opinion, very dangerous. More power to them. Frankly, the only thing I did become annoyed with is how the systems to purchase land have become perverted. Just try searching for land and you'll know what I mean. Some lots listed for 0 with the real price in the description, others listed in other ways. It took me a good two weeks just to figure out what the heck I was looking at. I do with LL would make some policies about how land is posted.

Do I think it's a good thing that they intend to drive land price down overall? I guess the answer is yes. I say this for three reasons...

a) People who have made a business out of land have been warned. Sheez, in the real world, the stock market doesn't give me fair warning before going down. Any land speculators left sitting on land for a loss deserve what they get. Other people such as Ms. Chung still have the opportunity to offer what amounts to the real world equivalent of "planned communities" that will command a premium if they actually offer a value add service.

b) People who are using land for a business other than land shouldn't really be affected. Seriously, how much could you really lose here? What is the amortized amount of that over the life of your business? If you're business isn't generating sufficient profits to cover that, then it probably wasn't viable anyway.

c) People who are using land for non-business reasons (homes, entertainment in general) also shouldn't really be affected for similar reasons.

d) On the positive side, I agree that people will feel more invovled in the game if they have a home. This will drive overall growth in the economy, as others have noted.

OK, one final point in the "long term vision" category. Nobody on this thread has bothered to think about what would happen if LL open-sourced the server code. Such a thing needs to happen eventually if the "metaverse" is really going to expand in any significant fashion. If LL doesn't do it, then they'll get overturned by some other company that did. Eventually, land is not going to be a commodity anymore. At home right now, I have a web server. At some point in the not too distant future, I hope to have a "land server". Net effect is that the SL "metaverse" will expand beyond all recognition and the foundation of the economy will be, as it rightly should, intellectual property mixed with real world goods.

I agree with much of your analysis. I'm not so sure, however, that when the server becomes open sourced, people are necessarily going to be able to run grid-connected servers on their home cable/DSL connections. I do agree with you in principle that the landscape will surely see some substantial changes, particularly with regard to the current business models built around land sales and private island ownership/parcel letting - Mitch Kapor dropped some pretty big hints about this in a recent CNET interview he did. Folks who are currently turning a profit from these business ought to begin developing an exit strategy.

zk

Make sure the search criteria are set to what you want. Don't lump mainland listings in with estate listings (sounds like that's what the problem is). The two are apples and oranges.

Would you happen to have a link to this interview? I couldn't find it.

Sorry, it was Reuters, not CNet

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/01/26/interview-with-linden-lab-chairman-mitch-kapor-in-davos/

Island Deliveries Today

--- "we are back on track and will be delivering all due (and slightly overdue) islands today, about 300 or so. "

"Oh Woes!"

If adding 40 sims causes a 30% drop in land price...

What's adding 300 new sims going to do to land value?


My Answer: >> Nothing. They're not mainland sims. <<

It may or may not matter that they're not mainland sims.

If most of them were bought by corporations, they'll sit empty with anemic traffic and won't affect the rest of SL at all.

On the other hand, if most of them were bought as residential islands, SL residents fleeing urban blight for their newfound white-picket-fence suburban paradise will be dumping some land on the market on their way out the door.

Still, likely to have very minimal impact. 300 sims ain't what it used to be.

Theoretically, it increases competition for rentals. If those 300 islands were rented out with low acquisition prices and fair tier, it would take away however many people that may have been looking to purchase mainland for primarily residential use. Mainland will sit there longer. If said mainland sits too long, it may shake out the small middle resellers, who probably cannot afford to hold too much inventory too long. But without a better idea of who is buying and why, I'd say that their impact is marginal at best.

This thread is STILL GOING?

/reaches for asprin. Thinks again. Reaches for tequila.

*moves*

Better answer is "That never happened: it took adding 40-50 sims every week for a couple of months with no sign of let-up to make the bubble burst".

Though I'm kind of ticked off, in an obsessive-compulsive way, that they left this huge gash empty in the southern continent and went off to work on a new continent instead.

You raise some very good points. I Agree on most of your points about the land. The biggest threat we have here is land that is purchased, slopped up with maybe a few boxes then left for 5 months without a single login. This causes LARGE doses of land to become wasted. The idea of large land owners designing 'HOA' or 'planned community' locations might be to their biggest benefit as I myself wouldn't mind paying a fair price for a area that looked planned out and well formed (No clone-a-home look though...)

The big problem though we are facing is the Mainland servers are physically too limited. I think if they could max out more prims and people per mainland area (I assume this is limited in the fact of quality of play vs hardware being maxed out) They should fully finish a mainland area (Roads included in this) before moving on to more stretched out areas. Most people are buying islands because they have specific needs, such as large companies needing their own area dedicated to their needs such as schools or lectures, heck even conferences. However the average SL addict who wants to build their own rental lots shopping center and clutter it up similar to the rest of SL with no real mapping of the layout, should be 'forced' to work with the land that already exists on the mainland, buyout rarely used lots, rebuild them to look nice and find a way to turn a profit there.

In the end I think it comes down to lag and looks. The servers are growing way to fast to be able to handle the requests of 'looking good' and having the resources to supply those who have the ability to make it happen. Linden should consider greatly investing in those servers that already host mainland areas and upgrade them to death. This way the resources are there to manage the lag of SL.

Hopefully Linden will want to consider this or consider buying out those inactive account landholders in hopes to re-push the land back to the market.

Good, the greedy land hungry 'Buy it all so no one has a choice but to pay the price' profit making pigs are losing out. What exactly are these people who own land for the sake of selling it on again actually giving in a way of a service? Nothing but an advert in the land search, does that really merit the excessive amount of money they demand for land which was originally 10 times cheaper than the price tag they slap on it?

I was recently thinking "Maybe I should upgrade to premium and get some land" till I saw the prices for land.

I'm not forking out $30~ish on top of that to some third-party whose soul intent of having that land was to over-price it, just to make the premium account actually worth getting.



Go Lindens! Release more land! =D

Amen!

SL land is not a good investment

Unless you REALLY know what you're doing, avoid land as an investment. It's like buying a computer as an investment. The only value of the computer is what you can dowith it. Meanwhile it depreciates by half its value every year or so.

Think of SL land in the same terms, unless you're particularly savvy. Land is worth what you can do with it, and little more. It isn't like real land, which they can't make any more of.

Residents my butt. LL has a long term business strategy, and every action they make is based on furthering that aim. Fairness means nothing to LL. They don't even enforce their own rules, if they find a new way to integrate the infraction into their endgame. They have reached a point of notariety where they are forgetting the residents interest in order to cater to the large corporations who are coming in world, kind of like when the Bush administration pushes free trade deals that only benefit the international business community, and harm American jobs and national interests.

Just my $L0.2, as a new-comer, if anyone cares.
I am fairly appalled at the current price of land (and I despise land barons...this hate comes from another online game which allows players to own houses). I have not upgrade to premium yet for my 'free' 512 m2 parcel precisely because of how much it will cost to buy that 'free' parcel. The price might not be so bad except that I know how these things go. I'll find some decent little parcel, nice neighbors, little lag, then next thing I know there's a sex club/casino next door, or worse. Because of that, the current land prices are too high to me.