Buying a Sim?

A few friends of mine and I were thinking about buying a nice sim at auction, developing it with open water and no ban lines and then renting out the parcels. I looked at the map the other day though and the its filled with yellow(property for sale) that seem to be selling for less per square meter than some of the current auction prices. Is there something I'm not understanding? We don't plan to sell the land, just rent it -- but now I'm nervous about this glut of land on the market. Maybe it would be better if we held off for a while or cherry picked other sims--though I like the idea of terraforming an entire Sim and forming how it will look. The idea is make a nice little mainland paradise with boating, flying and without ugly stuff and restrictive ban lines.

Be aware, mainland only allows terraforming of +-4m, which doesn't allow for much at all. Pretty much, the land formation you buy is the land formation you're stuck with, the terrain is baked. If you want to really get creative with terraforming, an island is much better, +-100m.

As for the current auction prices, I hear a lot of it is waterfront, so that could account for some above market prices.

Yeah, we thought about getting an island--they have a cheaper initial purchase price and you get to control how they look. However, the "water" around an island can be very limited and we wanted decent boating. We also didn't want to pay an the extra $100 per month in tier which would make it more difficult to just break even every month.

Almost all of the new sim auctions have waterfront it seems. However, after its cut up most people are left with little ponds with a beach on it and red ban lines on all sides. We do realize we can only terrafrom +-4m, which is why we're being picky about what we might get. I don't know though, there is SO much waterfront out there.

I've read that LL wants to encourage people to accept tier charges and one way of doing that is to make land very, very cheap. The question is, how cheap will it go? hmmmm