Mainland (the new continent) price is going to be adjusted violently!!

But you can't consider one without considering the other. If you price land higher, it will take longer to sell. If you price it below the market average, people will be swarming over it within minutes (assuming land search works )

If you sell it quickly, you can use the income to flip more land. If you have it longer, you might make more per plot but you'll be able to buy & sell fewer plots in that time (assuming you stay cash neutral)

And all the time, you have to consider the possibility that prices might change while you're holding land, or between selling land and buying more. Supply could dry up, or they could flood the market, so you have to take those risks into consideration also.

Case in point: I'm trying to buy a domain name and want to withdraw some money from SL so I can afford to make a reasonable offer on it. I therefore price my land considerably under market average. Result: I sell 3k usd worth of land within an hour.

Where is this new continent? I've checked the map and I still only see the 3...

Hey Musicteacher, I had the same problem initially. It only shows up if your zoom is nearly totally maxed inward. Search: Excalibur. That's one of the new sims and will allow you to see the continent.

I have found the easiest way to find the new continent or any new land is to click the links in the auctions page.

It appears that this thread has mostly land dealers in it so far. And while
land dealers do provide a vital function in SL. I think that LL is more concerned
with the attractiveness to the platform for new residents than worrying about
scaring off new land dealers.

No offense but I do not think it would be necessarily bad publicity if an overzealous
land dealer loses some money. Especially if it highlights the fact that SL does
deal in real market forces and then point to the fact, "hey now there's plenty of cheap land!', come on down and get some.

Most of the opinions offered here so far seem a bit optimistic from the land dealers point of view.

I would point out the possibility of the continued price stability being a combination of things such as an influx of buyers as a result of those that were holding out for first land now giving it up and buying.
In addition to as someone above pointed out that there is a great deal of flipping going on before anyone is actually occupying the land.
It is a bit like musical chairs.

Indeed the flavor of this thread makes it sound like LL cannot keep up with
demand and that they could not bring prices down even though they are trying to.

No one Really Knows what will happen but the older residents seem to agree
that this is a price bubble.

I think we all know deep down that eventually server software will be opensourced and land will drop to near zero. The question is when.

Infiniview, I tend to agree with you.

Zen

I've been exploring the new continent last night and this morning, drawn by the lovely sim names, and quite a bit of what I saw for sale seemed quite reasonably priced. Maybe not by old-timer's standards, but certainly good by the standards of newbies like myself who haven't seen a 512 for under $9000 unless there was something horribly wrong with it.

Also, whoever said a while back that the new continent was boring was crazy. Lovely sim names, lovely terrain -- I normally can't stand beach-type areas, but even I love some of the waterfront I'm seeing. The unnamed sim I'm flying over now has a natural private harbor and a larger bay for public use, and even a few sandbars. And if buying a sim weren't hopelessly out of my reach, I'd be bidding on Taernil's Bluff in a moment, even if it is PG. I'm whimpering with land envy over here, this despite my home sim being pretty nice. I just hope some of these sims go to people who actually do lovely things with them, and not just folks who flatten out all the pretty slopes and build malls and suburbs. I'm sure it will be much less pretty once it's full of ban lines and boxy buildings, but for now, it's beautiful.

Of course, I'm probably just shooting myself in the foot by encouraging you all to keep prices high, but then I couldn't realistically move out here any time soon anyway.

The question is why would anyone want to visit an open-source sim? Who knows what manner of evil things could be hidden in such a server? How fast is the connection rate going to be to that sim? Does that sim have full access to the LL asset server, will my client have full access to the asset server while I am there?

Unless an actual open-source sim has connections to the Official SL grid, you are correct, land ON such a sim would have a value of zero.

Max

Profit margins are smaller during a stable market (when dealers buy cheap land to resell at the market rate) than during a swiftly rising market (when dealers can buy cheap land and resell it a few days later at a much higher market rate). Risk-adverse land agents like to balance their purchases and sales, so that they have a constant cash flow without a huge inventory (risk).

But not to the people who own that server, or their friends. Certainly, for a business, you'd want land on the main grid, but for residential use, a pocket dimension would work quite nicely. I'd dearly love the chance to have my own little region on my own disk, where I could build my personal paradise without fear of griefers or neighbors. The ability to allow a few friends to visit would be good, and best would be the ability to connect or disconnect from the main grid at the owner's will, but even without those, it would be worth it just to have a safe undisturbed place to sort inventory, read notecards, build things, make sure my clothes are rezzed before travelling to the main grid, etc. You wouldn't even necessarily need constant access to the asset server, just a reliable way of copying the data to and from the asset server when you're ready to travel between them.

And if people didn't need the main grid for residential use anymore...

Generally true, although some older residents remember land being L$20/m2 before. This would be a good time for a real estate "bear" to sell off their land holdings and save the cash for the market crash. Then they can buy back in and make profit of their own.

However, it seems to me most of those people predicting a crash would rather just use their land and enjoy SL in other ways--just as many newcomers would rather buy in now and start having fun rather than waiting out the market.

Impossible to open up server source since all scripts and other content would then be easily stolen and where is Lindens profit going to go then? Lindens make nearly all their money off of land tiers and purchases of SIMS. they will never kill off THAT golden goose.

Dont get me wrong, Id love that especially since i have access to a large number of Quad processer blade servers running on very high bandwidth lines that are totally and completely empty but after speaking to a good number of people about why and why NOT this could happen Ill stick to my thoughts that it just will not happen

I'd like to agree that it would be weird and foolish and illogical of Linden Labs to pull the rug out from under their own money-making, but they seem to make a habit of doing weird and foolish and illogical things, at least since I've been around, so I'm not going to try to predict what they will or will not do.



I've heard this said before, and I don't really understand why that would be the case. Certainly, they'd want to protect the asset server. But why couldn't they release just what is needed to build your own region and allow communication between your pocket dimension and the main grid? Compiling my own MUCK doesn't give me access to what's on anybody else's MUCK, not even the original server I'm using if I haven't downloaded the original library to go with it, and the original library isn't required. Why would that be true with SL?

Addition: Plus, although they'd lose money on land sales, they'd be able to offset that by taxing communication between the pocket dimensions and the main grid.

I think what we may be getting sooner is alternative clients that allow you to use similar tools
as in SL. Which would allow you to build offline and then upload your prims after logging in.

This is not available yet but I don't see it as being too far off.
Of course you would want to make sure you got it from a reputable client dealer.

That is a potentially good market is the sale of high quality alternative clients.
Maybe something optimized for speed or to the capabilities or your own system.
Rather than the prior examples which mostly were designed to game the system,
copybot, swoopbot etc.

Talking about this caused me to visualize a 3D client viewer war between microsoft and google, with various sub par contenders providing free viewers complete with onscreen ads
and spyware, lol.

When pigs fly.

Servers cost money, so what makes you think anyone will outlay significant amounts of money and time in order to provide free land? There might be some computer geeks doing it for themselves and a few friends, and absorbing the time and expenses as cost of a hobby, but the vast majority of SL residents are not going to have those kind of connections.

Whether you're paying LL or someone else, you'll still be paying for land. Paying for the cost of the server, the initial configuration, the energy/housing costs for the equipment, and the oversight provided by a knowledgable IT tech team to keep it running smoothly 24/7.

I disagree. Most people don't need a whole sim, and my guess is that many home computers could run a 1024 plot in the background, without interfering to much with other functions. I think sooner or later building your own sim will be part of a client package from someone, and you will see a lot more tiny islands.

I'm not sure about this. Running a 1024 parcel on your own computer, that does not attach to the grid in any way, sure. Running your own island, tiny or not, if it's grid-attached, I think it would require a lot more resources, as well as time and effort to set it up and maintain it. I don't see the 'client' ever incorporating enough to run a full-fledged grid-connected sim.

In other words, I think if it were that 'easy' on the computer to support a sim, then existing sims would run a lot better considering they've nothing else to do but run sims.

What I could see is a bit of both ideas -- in other words, maybe version 2.x of the client will include that 1024m of offline 'world' -- a place that you can connect to on your own, whether the grid is up or down, that is available only on your local box and is not on the grid. You can use this for offline building, scripting, etc. and maybe even 'offline' IMing but nobody else can get to it. You could upload your offline prims and objects to the grid (for the usual nominal fee) of course.

And LL have said they plan on open-sourcing the servers eventually. From what I've read, they don't want to be in the land business. There'd probably be a fee for the grid-connection, but I do think companies, hobbiest groups, and dedicated individuals can and will eventually build and support their own sims and will pay LL to have those sims be part of the 'world'.

-Atashi

Bingo.

Not seeing a lot of the land flippers that were around in 2004 in this thread, or even in-world, are we?

I wonder why... hmm... it couldn't be that they got burned could it? Nah...


If the Company wanted to, they could drop 1000 sims out of the blue. I suspect the real reason they aren't is not because of sims per se, but grid architecture bottlenecks - the asset server doesn't like 35k users online at once.

And they are working on that furiously. Once it gets solved - and it might already be, and in testing - you better believe there's gonna be some massive outlays of sims.

The Company well knows the price point it likes to offer to its users, and they haven't been shy of telling us what they think of today's land prices.

Their advanced messaging system is in place, they have parallel client beta on the main grid, and they will be able to swap protocols without bringing the grid down soon, for test. This adds up to more user capacity for the grid.

When user capacity can safely skyrocket, the brakes will be off the rollercoaster. You are gonna see some land traders scream real loud once the first loooong land price dip confronts us.

Just my personal opinion.

One thing I wonder about -- and as a multi-Island owner I'm sure you've thought about this -- is LL's target price points as reflected by Mainland vs. Private Island prices.

With the recent changes, you can get a private island sim for ~$1700 + ~$300/month.

Tier for an entire Mainland is ~$200/month, and if / when the mainland land price bubble, bursts, presumably mainland sim auction prices will go for significantly less than $3000, getting a bit closer to the initial outlay for an Island.

It just seems to me there's a rather large discrepancy between monthly ongoing costs for maintaining a sim's worth of Mainland vs. Island. Is there a sensible reason for this? Or, should we expect tier on the Mainland to increase to be more in keeping with Island maintenance fees?

If there were a "massive outlay of [mainland] sims", wouldn't that really cut into sales of Private Islands, which are likely also pretty profitable for LL?

Well, if you want your friends, and you want your inventory and all that... you need main grid and asset server access! Or when you disconnect your mini-sim, all your friends disappear... or worse... go nekkie!! <g>

If you want, as Atashi describes, a truly private place to build, script, etc, that does NOT require grid access, I can see that.

What would I like?

A downloadable, locally storable inventory. A private mini-sim to work on all by myself, withOUT requiring access to the grid. And the abillity to upload items/scripts/textures etc from that mini-sim to the main grid.

My ideal SL <g>

Max

You are aware, that Private Island owners have numerous tools and features that are unavailable to Mainland Sim owners...

Is that $100 worth of features? Ask a private island owner.

Max

i was there twice price to high i left

15+ cents per sq meter for green landlocked land is not my idea of a good deal *runs back to reasonably priced estate land and hides*

yes presently the "first sell value is between 14-16 cents per sq meter when i went" now I am looking for a plot but not paying somethign that when i do want to sell is probably going to result in me LOOSING money not gaining it. I wanted 512 or possibly 1024 of reasonably priced land (landlocked not worried its for a studio which will be in the clouds i need a workshop) now if i am paying the upper end of the spectrum for new land that has not been bought and resold once yet where does that leave people?

these prices are truly unreasonable i might pay 7k but damned if i can find a 512 plot that is selling for 7k but 7k is my upper most limit and I think it is a lot of people

the new car smell is great but you still need to charge a rate that makes sense I mean like WOW its trully out of hand now 2 or 3 weeks ago the upermost RESELL rate was 16 cents even if you are a flipper you aren't going to want to buy this and i'm not but no one in his right mind would by this to resell it.

Now you talk about the new sl residents they are new lets try to keep them shall we?

Not sure that they are $100 worth of features. I was one of the lucky ones to get all my island orders in under the old tier, and for 195 a month vs mainland ? Oh heck yeah its worth it. No ads, no spinning porno signs or penis hoverbikes parked all over the neighbor's land, no inflated prices to deal with from the greey land monkies, 100m of terraforming fun, and I can estate ban any joker I want to just because. Life is good.


Would I pay $295 for the same benefits per month? mmm probably.