100% accurate land market prediction

which I guarantee: Mainland prices are going to change

OK jokes aside, anybody have any theories for why land prices are so low? They are now even below the wholesale prices of the newestly purchased sims by almost L$1/m^2

It was mentioned on another thread that LL has changed how many times you can run a search in a given amount of time. I wonder if the bots got broken, so the land that is being listed low is staying available for longer.

I have been trying to figure out for several days now why people are paying more at auction for sims than parcels are selling for on the market.

I have no answers, but I have also noticed that market sales of Lindens are less favorable to sellers in the same time frame. Maybe people are cashing out their chips and going home.

The bots aren't broken. If anything the search limit has actually limited the human's ability to search efficiently.

In my business, I tend to speak to a lot of landlords...and several of them have mentioned to me recently that it's currently a tight market for acquiring renters.

It seems that the expansion of land is outpacing the ability of land-owners to buy and develop profitable areas...and so landlords are starting to slow their buying...

...when landlords slow their buying...other people find more lots available...

...and land barons who try to buy parcels low and sell high are finding a tighter market for their resale...

...so it's basically just a market correction.

Personally...I have never and will never pay more than L$7/sq. m. for a parcel of land. Period. If that means I never get anymore land, that's fine...I've got enough. If prices hit that mark again, I'll buy some more.

I agree and that is because that is all it is really worth. Anyone who has been in SL long enough knows this.

I'm still singing, "Supply and Demand."

Yet another example of the half-wit geeks at LL who refuse to listen to people and impliment ridiculous features in it's place.

Throttling the search only plays into the hands of the greediest of the greedy bots, who use multiple logins to thwart the search throttle.

They basically eliminated competition between bots and focused all the purchase back to the ninja bots.

Not too bright, if you ask me.

I read a comment by someone that said they were currently running over 50 accounts at one time.

A per account throttle on search rate would favor these folks with high numbers of accounts running landbots over those with low numbers of accounts, whether those with low numbers of accounts are searching manually or using landbots, wouldn't it?

For mainland to reach L$ 7 /sq.m., something's got to give. Under current circumstances, it pretty much can't happen.

At current exchange rates, a full sim of mainland at L$ 7 /sq.m. would cost almost exactly US$ 1675. But that's the purchase price (setup fee) for a private island, yet an island costs US$ 295 /month, whereas a full sim of mainland costs only US$ 195 /month.

Mainland has some disadvantages compared to private islands (can't terraform too much, can't pick your own region name), but also some advantages (you get some casual flyby traffic or map-derived traffic). So if mainland prices ever started tending toward L$ 7 /sq.m, some of the people who would buy islands might instead buy and hold entire mainland sims at auction (they will start buying "mainland islands". A new wave of land barons might appear, who buy and hold and rent out mainland rather than chopping and flipping it. Or someone who wants an entire region for their store might look at the auctions and say, OK if I buy a mainland sim called "Lendrum", I'll just shrug and rename my store "Lendrum Furniture" and save US$ 100 a month instead of buying "Fred's Furniture" island. Either way, this reduces the supply of mainland available for sale, driving prices back up.

So it's hard to see mainland sustainably reaching L$ 7/sq.m., unless LL changes other prices in some fundamental way (raising mainland tier to match island tier, for instance), or if exchange rates change substantially (and L$ 7 costs more than it does today), or if SL starts failing and people massively dump tier on their way out the door.

By the way, unless you only own the free allotment of 512 sq.m. and no more than that, your monthly tier payments will add up over time. If you own 1024 sq.m., then at current exchange rates and current mainland tier pricing, you will be paying L$ 16 / sq.m. / year. If you own 65536 sq.m., you will be paying L$ 10 / sq.m. / year. Over time that will completely overshadow the initial purchase price.

I tested the search function, and it applies to the current login only, so yeah... this totally favors bots and penalizes individuals.

The situation has gone from bad to much worse.

But who is affected by this?

-- Not LL: they just throttle until their servers can comfortably handle the load. They probably throttle per IP address and per detected MAC address, so running 50 bots entails problematic hardware and bandwidth issues.

-- Not the hapless sellers: they keep losing no more and no less than before, regardless of whether it's a bot or a human that buys their underpriced land.

-- Not the general landbuying public: they never had a chance to buy bargain land anyway, even before bots arrived on the scene, unless they were prepared to join the ranks of the full-time land-search clickers themselves. They buy land at market prices, regardless of whether it was a bot or human that flipped the land and resold it.

Not to sound too unsympathetic, but it seems that only a narrow class of SL residents is affected by this, outcompeted by the bots. It's not clear that it's everyone's problem. To the extent that there is public outrage over the use of bots, some of it seems to be driven by misconceptions, for instance that bots were supposedly snapping up First Land rather than underpriced secondhand land, or that bots rather than market forces of supply and demand (or LL manipulation of supply) determine land prices.

The real solution is to make land sales in SL more like land sales in RL. In RL, you set an asking price, but you also sit back and entertain multiple offers. In SL, anytime land is for sale to "anyone" rather than a specific user, clicking to buy it should automatically trigger a 24-hour auction. That would protect hapless naive sellers from themselves and remove financial incentives to operate a bot.

The maximum amount of server resources used to benefit a handful of bots is patently unfair. I pay LL for a service, one of which includes equity of resources and the other is equal access to available markets. Currently, for all intents and purposes, the land search widget is only practical to bots. This is wholly unethical and completely unacceptable.

The current change in database search only benefitted the bots and further restricted residents. Whoever made this recent change, should be fired for only making a bad situation worse.

The might just as well nerf the search window now too, because it's completely useless to anyone except bots or people who don't mind paying inflated prices.

That's a curious statement. The search window is perfectly useful to end users who are looking for a parcel of land for their own use, at market prices. The overwhelming majority of parcels for sale in the search window consists of chopped-up parcels from recently-auctioned sims, not flipped-and-repriced bargain parcels. The number of bargain parcels available to be snapped up by bots or anyone else is only a very small fraction of the total land for sale, there are simply far too few of these to affect land prices in any meaningful way. Land prices, whether inflated or not, are currently largely determined by supply and demand (and LL manipulation of supply, in particular).

Falling land prices are relative to releasing new sims. Bots don't have much to do with the market other than eliminate competition, which cause some decline in the market because competition between buyers is reduced.

You said earlier, LL loses nothing by this policy. I beg to differ. Alot of land people use "rotating tier" to move land. Come billing dates, the tier is largely empty for the most part, therefore LL had a good scheme in collecting more tier than owned land base. LL currently has 100s of 1000s of sq.m of abandoned land sitting in upaid tier too, which is revenue negative and have diverted land management personel to other tasks. Secondly, LL loses out on alot of LindeX service fees, because one bot operator at $1 per transaction adds up to a hill of beans.

Then of course, there is the underlying issue of inviting people to SL to do business. Why would anyone come to SL and create a business, only to be co-opted? (GOM is a perfect example). Nobody will create anything, knowing it will be taken away from them at the behest of managers who couldn't care less.

A lot of new land is becoming available, which is probably nearer to keeping pace with demand than has been the case a few weeks ago. Also there was that land crash, when prices dipped by 60% and then recovered. That must have shaken confidence. Also maybe the RL property sitiuation in USA might be affecting the amount of cash people want to pump into SL.

I have come across several cases of 'empty casino syndrome' and 'empty club syndrome' - sooner or later many of these premises close, I would imagine.

Now THAT is a prediction I can applaud!

Yes, all the new supply is finally catching up. They've been dumping a lot of new mainland since mid-January...

Actually I think that is a device that some people use to try to extort high prices for reselling land, instead of the spinny rotating ads. There is a casino on a 512 lot next to my main location that has never had anyone there since the guy bought it, but it sure has a high price tag on it. I can't help but think its sole purpose is to try to scare the neighbors into buying it. Hasn't worked though.

The casino across the road from my place is absolutely THE ugliest building in SL and it is huge, like thousands of sq m, and is empty unless the camping chairs are on yet it has over 60 people banned from it!!!!

That sounds like the Spinach Games extension in Sprawler. Generally a huge vacant lot. Same actually for most of the Spinach Games place in Spinach.... huge empty ugly mausoleum with the obligatory 40 zombie campers stuffed in one corner.

How can the sales of Lindens be unfavorable? A selling rate of 266/ dollar is a great rate in anyones eyes. Its been at 265-268 now for quite some time.

I'm accustomed to getting 265, and it was more frequently up around 267-268 the past few days. It's much more favorable today - back to 265. But then again, Thursdays are good days to sell.

Where is it? I just have to see the ugliest building in SL. It has to be a creative wonder. To beat out some of the ugly buildings I've seen, the creaters would have to have spent months designing it with "ugly" the number one priority. It is a rare art form.

Not necessarily some builders are just gifted