Auctions having a fire sale?

[Qie Niangao]

Check out the auctions page. There are dozens of parcels up for Sunday's auction, all listed with L$100 opening bid. This is new.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

All of them small parcles with not much to recommend them either.  Maybe they are rtyring to get rid of a lot of abandon land before going on Steam because it sure doesn't look good.

[jwenting]

ah, "it sure doesn't look good". What are you still doing in SL? All you ever do is spread your ideas about doom and gloom... Or are you maybe working for a competing grid, trying to get people to abandon SL and try yours (yes, seen that kind of thing first hand doing support for a game company in the past, staff from a competitor blackmouthing our products on our support forums using multiple accounts, then "advise" to try their own product when asked privately what they'd recommend instead)?

[Qie Niangao]

Umm.  I think you were responding to Amethyst, but I also think you didn't understand her comment the same way I did. To me, it's rather a hopeful idea, to tidy up as much abandoned Mainland as possible before any Steam hordes arrive, if they do.

That said, there are fresh Mainland and grid-wide land statistics released today. Whether the numbers look good or bad is left as an exercise to the reader.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Excuse me? My comment was that  having a lot of abandoned land around when the Steam players come to check out SL doesn't look good.  What they are doing is a good thing.  How is that doom and gloom?

As far as your accusation that all I ever do is spread ideas of doom and gloom around.  I've been in SL over six years in this same avatar,  to your less than a year.  I make my RL living in SL as a custom content creator, sim builder and for five years as an official SL Solution Provider advocating for SL and helping RL and SL businesses make the most of it.  I am not affiliated with any other grids.  I have a strong commitment to SL. In fact i have just launched a major new business in SL that took over 15 months of development.   Why on earth would I be spreading doom and gloom around?  Show me one post I've made advocating that people go to another grid or that SL is dying or any other type of doom and gloom in general.  Yes I may have posted that I don't agree with everything that LL does but that is my opinion and intended as constructive criticism for the GOOD of SL.

I don't know you so looked up your past posts and can say that the most I may have done is disagreed with one of your more rash posts. Disagreeing with your opinion is not spreading doom and gloom around.  And BTW, what is this about 'our' products?  I don't see in your profile or in any of your posts that you create anything in SL.

 

[Phil Deakins]

jwenting makes negative posts all over the forum. It's best to see him as a general 'objector' and not take him seriously.

[Phil Deakins]

I didn't see the L$100 listings but I just had a look in the acution. How long have the listings been 0.5L$ per metre? The last time I looked in there, they were listed at 1.0L$ per metre - I think.

[Qie Niangao]

Right, those L$100 listings appear to have been a one-time thing. The approximately L$0.5/m² price has been in place for... a while. I want to say a year or more, but I don't recall precisely. I've also seen a mix of opening bid prices, with some parcels still starting at L$1/m²--maybe double-primmed or something--I recall thinking they were places certain to command much more than that, even in this market.

[Qie Niangao]

I happened to check today just as auctions were closing. Of 10 auctions, three got the opening bid at the L$0.5/sq.m. price (and no subsequent bids). None of the parcels were exceptional, although one that got a bid has some cluttered waterfront.

[Prokofy Neva]

I can't see how this possibly has anything to do with putative new Steam players.

In order to come into Second Life and figure out that there is a lot of abandoned land on the Mainland and then figure out the pricing on the auction, you'd have to really be following Second Life for awhile, and in depth. Most people don't go on the Mainland, they go to Linden Homes at the beginning or to island rentals. So it seems that a supposed motivation on the part of the Lindens to "get rid of the yellow" just doesn't track. This Steam player would have to have mastered looking at the map, flying around the Mainland, comparing prices, etc. etc. Just doesn't track.

As we know from Tyche Shepherd who does the grid surveys, only five percent of the Mainland is abandoned. That actually isn't very much. It just seems like a lot when it's on your sim.

I don't have a scientific count on this, and maybe Tyche will soon, but it seems to me that the Lindens are auctioning off more land lately rather than abandoning it. I've seen a large parcel that seemed to sit forever in Grace, more than a year, suddenly go purple. I see other purple that didn't seem to be there before I thought they might keep in "maintenance" for ever.

I think it's more about two other factors:

a) just trying to squeeze more revenue out of the grid -- the purple lots can be sold for dollars or if for Lindens, a higher price than abandoned

b) selling lower on the auction because Governor Linden is now a victim of her own success -- land prices have dropped to ridiculous amounts -- 0.50 per meter won't attract bots anymore or even savvy buyers live, and even 0.01 isn't guaranteed to work, showing up as "0". Abandoned land sits there at $1/m for a year -- I just tracked some pieces like that.

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

As we know from Tyche Shepherd who does the grid surveys, only five percent of the Mainland is abandoned. 

---

As I read it, Tyche's Mainland Census that I cited above shows that at least 9.8% of all Mainland is officially abandoned. (Of course "all Mainland" includes a lot of Linden protected land, so of all Mainland that could be abandoned, about 15% is.)

Aside from that, I agree that the brief auctions "fire sale" probably had nothing to do with Steam.  Also, I too seem to see more parcels going to auction rather than to sale as abandoned... but I too don't have any hard data underlying that perception.

[Tyche Shepherd]

The very first Mainland Census I ran back in November 2009 found that abandoned land made up between 3.5% and 5.0% of mainland and this remained fairly consistent through the first part of 2010. However since December 2010 I have been running a quarterly census and the amount of abandoned land has generally increased and last month I reported that it was between 9.8% and 10.9% of all mainland

 

Here is how the amount has changed in the past two years

 

I do monitor the amount of mainland for sale in each Census but currently the method I use doesn't differentiate between Land for Auction or Land for direct sale , they are both classified as Land for sale so I can't say whether there has been an increase in land specifically put aside for Auction or not.

However the amount of Total Mainland for Sale  has steadly increased each quarter and since June this year the majority for sale has been by the Lab rather than by private owners. This chart illustrates this very clearly, the Jun 2011 census was the first one after the automatic putting on sale of abandoned land was implemented, prior to that, Linden Owned Land for sale was predominantly Auction only .

 

 

My next Census is due to be run in December and reported on SLU , I'll have a look at seeing if I can differentiate between Auction and Direct Sale Land.

Tyche

 

[Perrie Juran]

It would be so great if there was a way to survey undeveloped lots.

I do see in my travels quite a few that are not for sale, many of them being listed as 'for rent.'

This might add a few percentage points to the appearance of barren Mainland.

[Jadeclaw Denfu]

Perry Juran wrote: ""It would be so great if there was a way to survey undeveloped lots.""

The problem here, there is no SL-system based 'For Rent'-Flag available. Plus, it isn't always clear from the description (atleast to a script), if a parcel is actually for rent. Ok, Tyches Bot could try to look for rental boxes, but not all parcels have them, a to me well known rental firm (violet blue circular logo) has them only on roughly one third of the properties available. Plus, they would show up identical, if the parcel is occupied. So any statistical data extracted from that would be quite unreliable. And then said landlord offers almost all rental properties for sale as well. Others don't do that.

And then there is that dreaded skybox-problem: The land looks undeveloped, even marked for rent but the parcel/region is filled to the brim with skyboxes & skyboobs:

http://sl.jadeclaw.de/Snapshot_380.png

Bare land on the ground, but that's how it looks at 1500m above ground, skyboobs stacked with 200m distance between them.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

As we know from Tyche Shepherd who does the grid surveys, only five percent of the Mainland is abandoned. That actually isn't very much. It just seems like a lot when it's on your sim.

---

It clusters. So like Prok says here - it seems like a lot when on your sim.

Look around and you can see Abandoned land "everywhere", until you look to the side at that spot that isn't part of your first idea of everywhere.

 

- Often it is in chunks as a person who held a lot of land 'gets out' suddenly, or a whole sim full of people get chased off by a bad build.

Very often people who can afford 1/8th of a sim, buy up 2 whole sims... and when the bill comes, after a few months... they abandon. Quite often abandoned lots were all owned by a select set of people together...

But there's enough individuals with small lots also abandoning to put 'sprinkles of yellow' in betwee the large chunks. Look carefully though - and it all really is mostly still owned.

Plus you have the people sitting on a low quality lot they've put for sale for 3million linden for... whatever reason... and those lots stay yellow on the map for years at a time...

 

EDIT:

Abandoned has jumped from 5% to 10%, at the same time, sales by residents have taken a dive. Those two figures together suggest the amount of for-sale land might be about the same - but who is selling it has changed.

 However, amount for sale has gone from 4% to 8%. So amount is double.

But this might be because former abandoned land was just left there as empty govenor owned lands.

So while twice as much is not for sale... the amount actually owned might possible even be up. All of the former not-for-sale abandoned land now being on the market should reasonably have caused more than a doubling of the amount of land for sale.

- However this last bit is just speculation, laking data either way.