What to do about false advertising estate sale prices?

Well its a problem that has gotten steadily worse and worse over the past few months. You know the trick some estate owners are doing , pricing ther land at some rediculous amount like L$1 or L$5 and then you teleport to the land only to find that the price listed is a reservation fee and not the actual price.
We all know what is being done, they are false advertising, and no one yet has spoke up about it, even worse, people are rationalizing that instead of trying to do something about it, they just join in, "joining in" is NOT a solution to this problem. and its a BIG PROBLEM.

Look LL if your out there? please help, address this issue, find a fix, restrict offenders from posting land for sale or something! Every day honest Estate owners dont get the traffic to their sims they need because these scam artist and shysters are channeling the people looking for land into thier FALSELY ADVERTISED sims. You want to appeal to corporate interests right? well one look at this and you can kiss alot of corporations goodbye

Isnt misuse of resources a violation of TOS and not to mention thier unethical actions are making my experience unpleasant which I would think is against Community Standards.

What can we as average residents to stop this type of sales tactics if Linden Labs doesnt do anything about it?

How about insisting that the down payment and monthly rent is listed somewhere in the description? Or having fields for two mandatory numbers for each plot that is listed, the monthly rent and the down payment? These fields would appear somewhere in the search description BEFORE you had to tp the land to read the covenant.

Problem is these people are being sorted on a price per sq meter case so there is 5 pages of thier crap before we get to any actual prices, they shouldnt be allowed top placement in the search becuase they are lying about the sale price. When they sell thier land at L$1 they surely know that they are misusing the system, meanwhile my plot that is actually prices L$2 per meter less than thiers is 5 pages back and hasnt seen a person in days. that aint right!

I knew that and I agree. I was talking about them being forced to list the ACTUAL monthly price in the convenant, not the one they list to get higher in the search. Maybe if there was some way that the price listed was the only price a person had to make to take "ownership" of the land for 30 days...

To Raymond's down payment and rent fields, add a "block seller" field. This would let you block all parcels from the seller from being displayed in your list. So if you look at the hypothetical down payment and rent fields in the land sales list, teleport to the location, and find the info provided is misleading, you can block any other parcels owned by the same person from appearing in your list.

This would provide an incentive for the sellers to provide accurate figures.

Being able to read the covenant directly from the land sales screen would be good too.

Maybe the solution from LL point of view would be to further segregate the estate seach into actual sales and reservation/rental prices
they did a good job with separating the mainland from estate sales, Im sure it wouldnt take more than a single coders 8 hour workshift to make these changes

Or put it on the estate owner. Have them be forced to fill out a form with three numbers when listing land: Reservation Price. Down payment price. Monthly rent. And also yes or no for "tenant can resell land". Ideally these things would show up in the search description.

having the Estate options like Land division and resell and terraformability would be a huge addition, many covenants do not specify these things, and unless the buyer is very knowledgable its nothing but trouble when its not clearly defined

I agree again. I saw a plot I liked then was informed I could not terraform which is half the fun for me. And I could not resell, so the high deposit could not be recouped. It took a while to uncover these dealbreakers.

Thanks Steve too bad more people didnt put up more imput on the matter.

Shaky thing is if the problem is left to Linden Labs to fix, it could easy take months to even address the problem, I'd more like to know what we as average residents can do wghile awaiting LL's solution to the problem if they even consider it a problem

I think an informed and wary consumer is an effective consumer. People like Raymond, Rockwell, myself and others try to inform people. I simply believe that good karma thing.

Informing saves a few people but the larger mass of newbies and uninformed people are the lifeblood for the estate owners engaging in this misrepresentation. I wish there was a Linden that could atleast acknowledge that they are aware of this problem and are working on a solution

Doesnt that tell you something right off the bat? Your asking for a bait and switch even bothering to go look.

Some sim owners offer a pure rental in which case they might as well put the land for sale at L$1 just to get the extra advertising.

Things should just go back to the way they were several months back when private sim parcels couldn't be (re)sold, only mainland. Having an identical process for both mainland parcels and private sim parcels gives the latter far too much credibility while the security of the mainland land is backed by LL, and simply non-existant for island land.

Alot of disagreement ther Kitty, firstly advertising it for $1 is misrepresentation, thats what needs to be stopped, secondly, saying fair dealings in simland is nonexsistant is completely wrong, just cause a few do bad doesnt mean that the general population of estate owners do the same, I doubt even LL can compare with many sim owners on fairness, understanding, CS and compassion.
For instance I have a land owner that was out of SL for nearly two months from open heart surgery, when he came back online his land was still there, despite being two months late on tier fees, you think LL would have shown that type of understanding and compassion? NO his land would have been gone within a week of them not being able to take money out of his account for tier fees, which, is technically acceptable LL does nothing wrong in that matter but, compassion and good CS is much more plentiful on private sims than on mainland. Just a few bad eggs making it look like BS