60 new sims online... some possible deals too :D

Protip: Recently around 60 sims were put online. Most of them are green with not much water, which could increase the marketability of waterside a bit.

This includes a sim south of Medusa which appears to have no water, but the terraformability limits are such that more than half of the whole sim can be made to have water. Expect to be able to bid on this sim for a lower price than its worth because of this. Hopefully someone who is experienced with terraforming plots to make them marketable will buy this, unlike the case with the sandland of the east central continent.

Ooooh, I hope LL drops a big cluster of them at once and I can get a good deal! The auction page is looking a bit sparse right now...

I wouldn't count on it This is only enough sims to last for a bit more than a week of auctions.

I have this mental image every time I see a block of sims come up.


Two avatars talking on a coastline: one trying to sell land for $L 50 a meter to the other guy.

Suddenly, from great height, a mountain range drops from the sky, landing on the seller but not the buyer, then doing a continent-sized dead cat bounce...

Classic

When LL lists 8 at a time they get $3k+ at auction's end. When they dump 20 they get $2.8k. Will be interesting to see what strategy they take. Their notion that these new sims would lower prices overall has not panned out since there are too many baby barons keeping the base price above L$13 a meter. They made the gesture and the statement that the new continent was to get prices down. The public outcry about high prices has subsided even if prices have not dropped much. So LL might as well go for top dollar and only release 8 sims at a time.

They also said they would do something about land bots and nothing has been done. Further proof that their blog posts aren't worth the pixels they are written on.

Well said... well said... I have alot going on in RL right now, however I wouldn't invest a large sum of money at the moment in mainland under any circumstances. I highly doubt we'll continue to see new barons at the rate they're currently coming along indefinitely and when that stops happening... well, I'll be there to take advantage of the market correction

I thought that too at one time, but with every auction, I believe more and more that there is a bottomless supply of barons. Look back at all the names of the auction winners of new continent land. There are a few well-known brokers. But there are also a ton of unknowns (and I'm not talking about JR)

I think the barons willing to bid up at auction outnumber the servers. I think the lowest we will go is 12 a meter, but that is only my opinion.

I think that's in part because people are sure they won't release 20 every day, it was a one off. Who's to say what would happen if they released 20 every day for a month?

I still think eventually we'll run out of baby barons with enough Lindex tier to make a proper go of it long term, and to make the best use of their land tier - but it will be slower at 8/day.

If they release 20 a day every day for a month, I agree it will lower prices greatly. Past history does not support this strategy but with LL, anything is possible.

I had a brief convo with Guy Linden on the day the auctions ended on those 20 sims. He couldn't comment directly, but he seemed to imply that 20 sims/day was not a sustainable rate of mainland creation. We'll see what happens, but I don't think LL can keep it going at that pace.

I love the smell of a good land prices thread in the morning!

Having been involved in domain names back in the 'good old days', I can say this is all too familiar... People hear of 1 or 2 people making millions and all of the sudden, you have a whole pile of people thinking SL is free money -- just like people thought of the web back in the late 90s. Eventually it becomes unsustainable... Growth can only go so far before it implodes on itself when there's too much greed. That's not to say the market won't recover -- thanks to advancements in PPC and technological innovations, many domains are worth as much as they were worth in the late 90s. I think SL will inevitably go down the same path... Not necessarily a bad thing I suppose. Much like dotcoms, a lowering in prices may allow some people the opportunity to buy property they would otherwise not be able to even consider...

I didn't think 20/day was sustainable, and they would still need to release a LOT more proportionate to the population to bring prices down. When the game only had 50k players, hell yes, 20 sims would really have crashed the market. But with 30k players on concurrently at almost any given time and the "secret" of wealth through land trade being out, there is no way that the prices will drop to 7L/m2 without LL putting 40-50 out per day, sustained for probably two or three weeks. of course, the only way to actually DO that would probably be for them to hold on to the new servers acquired for about 6 months, releasing only 1 or 2 every 2 days, and then dropping the servers like a bomb over the course of two or three weeks. In the meanwhile, we'd probably see the same run-up to 20L/m2 on land, and then the whining would start all over again about Linden interference.

These are boom times.

Unless everyone thinks the grid will grow with a million new signups a month forever?

Reese was smart, and got out. There's no added value from land speculation; all it does is drive up prices and drive off users.

So you know how much support the land speculators are going to get over the long term. None, or worse than none.


We could talk about the effects of hype -vs- good market moves over a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts... oh, wait...

I agree Desmond, but LL does give real estate speculator as a potential business model on their What Is Second Life page...

http://secondlife.com/whatis/businesses.php

Not trading land anymore, Reece? Got burned too badly when LL dumped the 40 sims?

I'm not sure that will happen- or at least not anytime soon. The SL land business is like day-trading. It's a game in itself, making a few dollars here, a few there, re-investing, etc. I can totally see how it's addictive, and how someone might keep doing it even if in the long run (considering tier, market changes, bad buys) someone might be losing money. I'm sure that for some people the immediate satisfaction of dumping some land for a higher price-per-square-meter than you paid for it is more important than making a long-term profit. And I also think that true profits from this business are hard to gauge unless you keep good records accounting for things like purchase price/sold price, subscription/tier/advertising fees, and I'd be surprised if ALL of these newbie speculators were doing that.

I was a little disappointed a couple weeks ago when I lost the auction on the new sim Succubus. I just wanted to be the Person Who Owned A Sim Named Succubus, but the person I lost to (I was taking care of my kids at auction end) parceled it out and listed it for sale the moment he took possession. By the time I got there, half the sim had already been bought and re-listed by others. (I did manage to snag a nice chunk of it for myself though, although I now have to settle for being the Person Who Owns 25% Of A Sim Named Succubus. Doesn't quite have the same ring.) It was the auction winner's right to flip the land for a slight profit, and I don't think that right should be taken away. But I can't help feeling a little indignant because I actually wanted to keep and use that sim, not simply sell it off!

Heh heh, I got hold of a sim called Samwise - I considered putting various quotes and pics from Lord of the Rings in the name & description so people would see them in the for sale list.

Might want to mention that to them then. Technically it *is* correct - many have tried; some have made a few bucks (presumably) as you have.

However all sustainable business supports the parties involved somehow - land speculation only facilitates market liquidity a little bit.

While LL is cranking out mainland sims, they have fallen behind on thier output of purchased Private sims, I would say to expect to see the hardware team to switch gears soon and start working on private sims again for a while, might see a slight rise in mainland prices again if that happens

The easy way out for LL is to open source the sim code. Then anyone can set up their own sim.

Just like anybody can set up their own webserver, putting web hosting companies out of business.

November 2006: Base price for land L$6 a sq. meter.

LL raises prices on Islands causing a run on orders at the old price. At the same time, they run out of RL real estate to put new servers. Island orders back up. They stop releasing Mainland. Land brokers enjoy their best quarter ever.

January 2006: Base price for land peaks at L$16 a sq. meter.

After months of a Mainland land shortage, LL decides to throw people complaining about land prices a bone and drops 40 sims and announces a new continent. Land bots arrive on the scene, adding to the fear and loathing.

Black Thursday 2006: Base price for land drops to L$6 a sq. meter.

LL keeps a steady flow of new sims coming. But at a faster rate, a new generation of baby barons buy them and reset them higher. Then LL does away with First Land. Land bots buy low, but sell at a reasonable rate, affecting other barons' profits but not influencing pricing. Base price for land quickly creeps up to L$13.2 a sq. meter.

March 2006:

LL falls behind on Island orders. They turn their attention and devote server space to Islands again. Somewhere in the jungles of Brazil, another baby baron is born. And Mainland prices begin their creep towards a base of $17 a meter...

who cares. SL land is not really land, it is just pixels on a server. SL won't even be around in a few more years after all the other new virtual worlds which don't rely on servers in some buildingto grow come online. good luck!

So not only virtual but imaginary too?

We don't need to pay for a server, we'll just put it on the intarwebs.