why land in the older sims costs more

i have recently started looking at land throughout SL using the world map and i have noticed that land in the older somes seems to cost a lot more than land in the newer sims.

Also the older sims seem to have more 16 m plots for advertisning on them which the newer plots dont.


i am comparing 512 plots and the older ones can be 2-4 times the price of the newer ones.

Can someone please explain to me why this is? is land in the older sims more desirable?

Also one sim i have been looking in which is an older one like i have described has a lot of land that isnt being used and not for sale either. this is one of the sims with very high prices.

thank you for any info you have


Rocket style

I cannot provide any useful insight, but I am powerfully curious how you are determining the age of a sim.

Because the new sims have been recently purchased by land speculators who want to move their product. The older sims are owned largely by end users who aren't in as big of a hurry to sell and can afford to wait for a better price.

I am sure there are several other reasons that older sims may cost more, but one of them may be terraforming... newer sims allow land to be terraformed by owner +4/-4 m. older lands were +40/-40

i found a list of some terraform limits.

For a look at SL maps back in the early days see this link , although a bit dated now.

"Older" sims are usually defined in SL as one of the core sims that were fully terraformable. Prices for land in one of these (which are all listed at the link provided by Florenze) do tend to be higher, although there really is no reason for it. Resellers like to charge a fortune for land in these sims, even though very few people in SL want or need fully terraformable land. It can sometimes take a year for parcels to sell in one of the core sims because of the ludicrous pricing that resellers set. My former parcels in Federal are still for sale after having been on the market for 3 months.

The core sims are a wonderfull place to own land, for the right person. They rarely have clubs and are usually largely owned by long-term residents, thus the turnover rate is much lower. Terraformability is very cool, however, for a 512 parcel you will get so little use of the ability that it won't make it worth the price. Fully terraformable land really only makes sense when you are talking about 1536 parcels and up, where you actually have enough room to sculpt the land.

There's also the fact that there are more unknowns with the newer sims.

With the older sims, you generally have some idea what will be on neighboring plots, at least short-term. With the newer sims, most of the neighboring plots are all also for sale. For all you know, somebody could buy one and chop it up into one of those awful, awful plots full of independent stupid 16sqm "advertising plots" filled with rotating signs.

The evil you know, and all of that.

Plus there's the fact that most of the land on the newer sims is boring, boring, boring. Flat and green is great for building, but the middle of a boring plane with no roads or water or mountains anywhere nearby is just not as nice a bit of land as a lot of what you can find in the older sims.

Rockwell is correct. The newer the land is, the more it resembles a wholesalers warehouse, because whoever bought them in the auction is eager to sell the land to free up tier to buy the next sim. Pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap is usually the order of the day there.

And, as Rockwell said, much of the land for sale in older areas has been put up by residents - they won't usually need to sell so quickly, and also might not have quite the experience of buying and selling (and therefore pricing) that the resellers do.

I find it ironic that the same people being blamed on other threads for jacking up land prices--land barons--are in this thread being held responsible for keeping prices low. On those other threads, blaiming land barons is being countered with supply-and-demand rhetoric. I think that works here as well. The reason land costs more on many older sims is that it is in lower supply relative to demand.

A newbie land owner generally doesn't care too much where they get their land, as long as it meets their requirements. Older players, however, often look for land within the same sim as the land they already hold, looking for more prims. When I sold my First Land, I was surprised; I had priced it way above market, reasoning that I didn't really care to sell it, but if someone wouild pay that much for it, I could buy the same amount of land somewhere else and have a little in-world capital to start a business. That land sold fairly quickly, to one of my neighbors; it was worth more to them than other parcels in SL because it was adjacent to their existing land and increased their prim allotment for existing builds.

On the new continent, anyone looking for Xm2 of land can easily find it all in one place at prevailing rates.

Personally, I wouldn't touch one of the older sims now. They are running on Class 3 or 4 servers with no timeline for upgrading. The newer sims are all class 5 servers and have shown me personally that they perform much better in laggy situations. I experience much less packet loss (actually, its usually 0 packet loss) and ...and...the air is fresher.

you're correct. =) a few older sims (miramare, grignano, barcola, sistiana) have double prim allowance too. their parcels rarely come up for sale and cost a bomb.

You can obtain a double prim allowence AND a class 5 server on some of the Island Estates, as well as (in some cases) a land covenent that may prevent misuse.

I have come around to the view (mid 2006) that owning land on a reputable private Island Estate is not a lot different from Linden land in terms of security, but far superior in quality

One factor that hasn't been mentioned is that the really old sims are close to the Welcome Area, the public Help Island and Orientation Island, and the Borrowdale stage. That means lots of fly-by visitors, which might be good for a business that sells to new residents. And some of them are in the Beta Test grid, which means people wandering in during SL downtime and having a look at your merchandise. (Of course, they can't buy then and there, but they might come back another day.)

Finally, since there is so little turnover, you pretty much know what you're getting in terms of neighbors. If you buy land in a brand-new empty sim or one that was recently First Land (RIP), all bets are off.

I own some land in Da Boom (the very first sim ever), which I've listed for sale. I don't need to sell it anytime soon, but would be happy to part with it for the listed prices.

512 sq m @ 99,999L
1536 sq m @ 299,999L
3104 sq m @ 2,999,999L (westside waterfront with access to Smith ocean sim - my baby)

Like I said, I don't need to sell it anytime soon. But Da Boom has value for collectors and I've seen land there sell for over 50L per sq m!

Newer sims may be shiny, but my store is in a newer sim, in Texas, and when SL hits 30k online, I can't rez or open scripts or do pretty much anything except lose inventory trying to work on my sky platform.

Or I can teleport to my old continent mainland home parcel and everything works just fine, if a little slower than usual.

Whatever sim you're looking for, I think you want one in San Fransisco.

For residential purposes I completely agree. It's not so good for mixed/commercial usage.