A dramatic finish to the new sims

I sure wasn't expecting to see that much last minute action

Was it anything like the finish to the Daytona 500 last Sunday?

Sure was

Geez some of them went up like 800usd in the last minute...

Wooot wooot..................I should have tuned in.

And... here I was putting a 2300usd bid on one of the sims seriously thinking I might win it

I remember the good old days of winning sims at $1000. I miss those days.

Not me.................I run like hell thinking of a 2300 USD downpayment on a car...lol

That's always the way it goes with desirable items, the real bidders show up in the last 20 minutes. Never bid early, it only drives the price up.....

Ebay tactic...............I know it well

My bid was in the last 5 minutes

I was away - how much did they end up closing for?

$2974 - $3705

Not unusual, I saw that happen in January on some waterfront plots. Interesting to see that most of the 8 finished slightly lower than recent auctions.

When i left this morning there was one going for $4001.00 US but there aren't any listed that high in the list of completed auctions.

I fail to understand why anyone would pay more for a sim worth of mainland than they could get a private sim for. Can anyone explain why that is rational to do?

A private sim gives the owner far more control. You can actually create something and maintain it.

A mainland sim is just something to carve up and dump on other buyers, and maybe make a profit, one time only, after which you no longer own that land.

Keep dreaming, Reece my boy

Tier? There's no doubt in my mind that the timing of the increase in mainland prices occurred around the time they announced the island price increases. It may not have been the sole reason, but it certainly helped to prompt it.

I think you just answered your own question as to why someone would want to buy a mainland sim.

I think LL cancelled bids for some reason, I saw the $4000.01 US, then it jumped down to $3500, then further down to $2200.

Apples and oranges, Ceera

They are bought for flipping, plain and simple. The usual suspects buy mainland, then carve it up into however many plots, knowing that middleman resellers will come and snatch it up, or maybe some lucky end user. They don't hold on to it, and the $195 extra tier is usually covered in the profit margin. But when they pay 13-14L/m2 to acquire it, their margin must be decreasing.... or they are increasing the amount the middleman has to pay to acquire the lot. At some point, if prices keep escalating, it may cut the middlemen out... but who knows what that point is?

Ok this is interesting, I don't remember can a person make a bid without a sufficient amount
of money in their accounts to cover it?

Possibly an attempt to falsely inflate sim costs, just an idea.

That only applies to auctions where the bidding is in L$.

Yes, actually they can. But here's a more *evil* thing to do. As we all know, you're allowed to default on a minimum 2 auctions before being banned from them. Now, if you have a friend who wants to help... Here's what you do: Get your friend to place a ridiculously high bid, say 5000usd. Now, put 4999usd for your max. Suppose bids were at 2000usd when this happened. The winner defaults and you would get the sim for 2000usd.

This isn't a joke. It's a fact. I got a 8k sqm parcel for super cheap once because I was the only one competing with the winner and the winner chose to basically "inflate" prices. I'm not affiliated with this person in any way, however it sure was nice to get a parcel for considerably less than my max bid

I would imagine LL was removing these bids because they thought such an attempt was being made to deliberately manipulate the auction system.