Bizzarre land investment behaviour?

Being quite new to land ownership, my humble abode is a little plot of 128 sq.m. put together from 16 sq.m. plots bought for a few hundred Lindens each.

But bordering my plot is one 16sq.m. plot that was on sale for L$50000. Today I was surprised to see that it had sold and was back on the market for L$99999!

My neighbourhood is unremarkable and land values don't tend to be high. Why would someone buy a tiny plot for L$50000, even if they wanted to sell it for double that, when they could buy 100 similar plots for LS500 each and put each one for sale at L$99999!

I can only think that this is a transaction between two accounts of the same real-lifer!

Or am I sitting on a gold/oil/diamond mine??

they dont normally sell.... and people who list that high normally keep those plots as spam plots to produce banner ads in SL. The price is set enourmously high so if you want rid of the spam you pay dearly for it.

I'd suggest a freebie at SLEX http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=154669

I would say neither...
They like to get 64m parcels that sit in bad locations for the other land owners around. It's almost a pressure scam as they know putting ads on that will usually force one of the neighbors to pay their high asking price just to get rid of them.

It's called land extortion. Someone will buy a tiny, relatively useless parcel of land, put something truly obnoxious on it, and charge an obscene price, expecting some nearby land owner to buy it from them to get rid of the eyesore. Then they just repeat the scam by buying yet another small parcel in the same sim and doing it all over again. People who do this are crooks who should be banned from SL. Why LL tolerates them, in spite of hundreds of resident complaints, is a complete mystery to most of us who are honest.

If you dislike this practice, I recomend ditching your mainland property, tiering down to Basic membership rather than Premium, and get a nice parcel on a private island. Most private sim owners will not tolerate land extortion schemes.

Many people have called for it to be impossible to parcel a property into such small chunks and sell it like that. LL has refused to do anything about this problem.

There use to be a rule that disallowed the parceling of a property into a checkerboard, which could be considered to apply here. Unfortunately it's like the rules "don't sneeze outside lest it scare the horses" that are still on the books, never enforced.

I totally agree with Ceera. There is NO REASON, WHATSOEVER for the LL Company to tolerate such disgusting tactics. The only purpose is to extort other players.

I bought a nice water property when I first joined back in the spring. A few months later I noticed this horrible box floating in the sky, obscuring part of my ocean view. It was on a 64 meter plot, up against mine, owned by the same person who sold me the property. He had it priced at about $50 a meter.

If you set your view to show property lines, you'll find sleeper cells like that throughout the mainland.

Two months ago someone built a blank solid building right on the water's edge in the neighboring sim. It was four stories tall and sat on about 300 meters. Funny thing, the land was also for sale, at about $43 a meter.

Why the mainland has been relegated to Wild West status with no planning and no zoning is beyond me. LL may say they don't want to "interfere" with SL society and we should "govern" ourselves. However, we have no tools to do that.

And while I'm ranting, why can't a person who buys a mainland sim at auction set its zoning? You might actually see some attractive areas on the mainland if we could. Why doesn't LL reserve X meters per sim to "public land"? You find "maintenance land" on some sims but not every.

I've heard the argument that LL doesn't want to "zone" the mainland, such as "residential only" or "business only" sims, because that "limits" the residents. But they do zone PG and Mature and mature land and that has huge limiting and economic impact.