The Problem of Landflippers

[emilia Avindar]

The problem of "landflippers" in SL may not be a problem, but the skill and aggressiveness of a landflipper in matters of auctions and the marketing of Mainland can affect your mood if you are on the short end of the stick.

Friends have put the onus on me to open this discussion in the forum, so here i am, two days after a stinging defeat in the Mainland Auctions.  To those of you with no prior experience on the Auctions, there are some basic reminders that may help if you ever enter bidding. 

My last bid on a parcel in my sim had been unchallenged for a few hours, so i should have known the other bidder(s) had not just shrugged it off.  Sure enough, while i was foolishly and dramatically climbing up on my roof to look in the direction of my soon to be winning bid .... (drumroll) .... i minimized the viewer for one quick verification of my email, and badda-boom, there was the notic my bid was losing (11:57am SLT) so i quickly went to the Auction tab and clicked on the listing to raise my bid in that last two minutes, now down to one minute.... TOO LATE !!!! my computer clock said 11:59am but the Server said "Bidding has closed" so there it went...my bid beaten by a lousy ten linden margin.

There are a couple of reasons i lost--i bid with my head and not my heart.  My heart, however, got much more angry at this loss than my head was prepared for.  My heart wanted to beat up my head for not raising my bid from eighty US Dollars to one hundred before the auction got this close.  My heart was angry that the Server did not allow me to attempt a bid with only seconds left--my heart was absolutely sure that i have enough experience at this to type in 25000 in even just one second if the auction board opens the window to enter the amount. 

However, i tried to shake it off.  After all, i didn't bid that high to begin with because i didn't want to pay alot, and i underestimated how much i wanted that land.  My head also immediately wrapped around that--i needed the additional 915 prim to have more use of the combined parcels i have dedicated to a public park in Clyde, both for my amusement naturally, but also to add elements that might increase traffic.  The terra is rare--green and granite striated -40/+40, in the original 2002 beta grid area, and my land is next to an old and significant relic--the Cage sculpture by Eric Linden. The parcel i was bidding on is adjacent to the Outlands battement wall, or barrier, which warns those approaching of the dangers of damage and even death in Jessie, the adjoining region, which is the first and only combat-enabled sim in Mainland, unless they have created something in recent years in the pirate sims.

Obviously, i am a big fan of Mainland.  My collection of three of the 4x protected parcels in Clyde represents, i believe, very rare land.  It allows me to enjoy most of half the region at only a fraction of the tier normally needed for that much visual space. For that reason, i have always felt the responsibility of keeping this land open and inviting, to let it tell its story to any passerby, or to be a home to the homeless.

My hope has been that at some point, i can get some help making a permanent public area here without having to carry the cost of the tier.  So that desire to be reasonable factored in strongly when i was bidding for the parcel up for auction--something i have never seen in three years of being a resident of Clyde.

When it was confirmed to me that the parcel in question was won at auction by a "landflipper", it was not a surprise but it did disappoint to see that the land had already been divided into marketable parcels and the land info described it for sale, although it was not yet set.

What is a "landflipper" ?  Just as in real life, it is someone who buys to resell.  There is nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with bidding at 11:57sm SLT.  That way the competing bidder won't get the notice in email soon enough to bid again.  I was inworld when it happened and i can tell you the Auction System does not give you a notification inworld that your bid is losing, so the place to be in those last moments is in front of your dashboard, not inworld on the roof, ready to rock.

A "landflipper" is also someone you can often sell your land to for pennies on the dollar when no one will buy it.  A good "landflipper" is also someone who helps keep down the clutter and loss of privacy that comes with smaller parcels being churned by less experienced landowners.  So, strangely, that landflipper 1) saves you from higher tier by buying that parcel you wanted so badly, and 2) is adding value to your region, and theoretically to your own land.  However, there are not enough buyers of Mainland these days and sometimes it seems only "landflippers" are buying Mainland, and especially the most plum parcels.

Thank you for following along on this discussion. I'm sure many of you lovers of Mainland have opinions about "landflippers" and whether thy add value or rob opportunity.  For me, it is an area of mixed feelings and both good and bad experience.  My favorite land broker (a nicer way of referring to a "landflipper") has not only sold me land at a slight discount but has also bought my land at a fair but discounted price more than once, and i must say i have watched this one and that one struggle to resell that same land, even abandoning it quickly when their tier was better used elsewhere.  A "landflipper" is just another person with a strategy and a set of guidelines who plays the land game rationally, not emotionally.  They are *not* an enemy, but are a force to be reckoned with when buying land at auction.

Here is a picture of the park area in Clyde so that you can see the "historic" nature of the original beta grid area, vintage 2002.

 

[Phil Deakins]

If you'd done it the better way, either you wouldn't have lost or it would have sold for more than you were willing to pay. Either way, you would have been content with the outcome.

The better way is to enter a maximum amount you are willing to pay. If someone outbids your current bid, the system bids again for you, but only the smallest allowable increase. And it does that until it reaches your maximum. If somone outbids your maximum, you lost, but you're content that haven't paid more that you are willing to pay. I'm sure that the auction system operates a maximum. I'm sure it used to, anyway - unless my memory is totally wrong.

[IvanTwin Rogers]

Welcome to a Bot landia,

 

These competing with a bot, are programs ready to automatically capture super cheap land and winning bets, are not playing with real people. and it is very difficult or impossible to beat a BOT Macro.

 

But you can fill a report. is awesome,

 

you can fill what?

 

 

[emilia Avindar]

Hello Phil, yes it's called your proxy amount--after a couple of bidding rounds, i raised it to 20,000 Linden but i remained the winning bid at considerably less than that until 11:57am.  At the last moment, my pangs of potential defeat made me try to raise it quickly to a bit higher, and while that would have been an emotional bid, it would have possibly left me the winner of the parcel.  However, i am told elsewhere that the winner probably used a bot to generate the winning bid anyway.  Does anyone know anything about this? And would such a macro be able to generate bids at the last moment? I fear a macro could in fact test the winning bid without taking the big proxy bid steps most of us use when we really want to win. It is true that your proxy bid may be ridiculously high and yet you win at a much lower price because no other bidder comes forward to test it, or at least not in the time it would take to attempt all those small steps.

However, this is not the first time i have lost at the last moment, and it does make me wonder if the landflippers use macros to outbid at the last moment.  If anyone has any knowledge of this practice, i ask you to comment here, because perhaps there needs to be a corrective action.

SUGGESTION--**LIMIT THE BIDDING INTERVAL TO ONE BID PER PARCEL PER HOUR**  ...this would not keep the bidder from bidding at the last moment, but it would force them to bid in ONLY ONE STEP, not to use a macro to climb up to the winning proxy bid.  This would encourage each bidder to give a reasonable proxy bid to stay in the bidding, so that it is not a robot's game at 11:57am SLT.

 

[emilia Avindar]

Thanks for that, IvanTwin,

How do i prove they used a bot?? While it seems likely that superhumans are bidding at the last moment, based on my experience, i have no way to detect it.  Can LL detect a macro is used by a bidder?  Customer Service told me there is really nothing that can be done once the Auction is closed.

[Qie Niangao]

---

...my bid beaten by a lousy ten linden margin.

---

If it's any consolation, the way the auctions work, every winning bid beats the next highest by exactly L$10. There's no way to know how much the winning bidder actually set as their limit--it may have beaten you by hundreds of US dollars.

Well, I hope that was consoling, because now for the torment: some history of that part of Clyde.

In this very early map (lifted from slmaps.com), you'll see that the Outlands Wall used to be on that auctioned parcel itself, and ran north-south, protecting innocent residents from the wilds of the Outlands sims --which included Clyde itself and those to the east, before Jessie even existed.

The wikia has an article with more history of how the wall got spun 90 degrees and moved.

[EDIT: Oops... that may be wrong. Looking more closely, I think the auctioned parcel was on the west edge of Clyde, and the wall was closer to the center. So, meh: not such a special parcel after all.]

[Phil Deakins]

People use the word "bot" in relation to anything concerning SL that's automated. But I wouldn't call an auto-bidder a bot because it's simply a programme. Having said that, search engine crawlers/spiders are sometimes called robots. In fact, a file called 'robots.txt' is a web standard for handling search engine spiders/crawlers/robots. It's just that, when it concerns SL, the word 'bot' is all too readily used, imo.

I've written quite a lot of programmes that access the web and do various things, like searches on search engines, submitting auto-generated pages to search engines, fetching pages that appear in search results - mostly stuff to do with search engines - including SL's search engine. If I was writing an auto-bidder, it would automatically log in, fetch the relevant page, ascertain the current bid, place a bid if desireable, and so on. It would do everything necessary to watch the current bid and bid itself - up to a maximum, of course.

In other words, it would automate what I would do by hand if I didn't have the programme and, because of that, I don't think LL would do anything to anyone who used such a programme in the auction. I may be wrong, but I doubt they would do anything.

 

[Qie Niangao]

It seems pretty unlikely to me that any automated bidding is actually going on, or if it is, it's just a one-shot bid while the human bidder is fetching coffee. My reasoning is that the last few minutes of bidding on prime parcels tend to jump by very large amounts from a number of bidders. What I think happens is that people simply hold off on placing their intended limit bid until as near the end as they can trust their computer clock to match that of the Linden auction server.

Well, that, and the fact that this is how I bid on auctions, too. :smileywink:

[Phil Deakins]

You may be right, Qie, but you're not a flipper. If I were a flipper, I'd automate it.

[emilia Avindar]

Thank you, Qui, fascinating information about Clyde and the Outlands wall. Wow! i never knew that, thank you. So Clyde pre-existed Jessie, completely, and was the original Outlands? Outstanding, hehehe...no wonder a handful of people have always wanted these parcels. I believe the parcel that just auctioned had always been held by the original owner, not sure what happened there because i had not seen that parcel go up for sale prior to hitting auction status.  However, most abandoned land is now converted to sale immediately inworld. I suppose this one was put to auction to give the public more of a chance at it.

Thank you also, Qui, for the links to the sl maps site and the history of Old Mainland. Now i am thinking i will rename my park land to The Outlands!

As for that proxy bid issue, yes by all means, set the proxy bid to as high as you are willing to pay, but forget trying to game the System by setting it high enough to win, because that is a dangerous game. Don't set the proxy to a thousand dollars and not expect someone to keep climbing up to test it.  What a game of nerves, wow.  In cases of such coveted land, it might be better if the Lab just puts it up for sale at a fat price to all comers--posting that land at 10 linden per square meter would have yielded them a net sale of 40,000 linden, or $161 US Dollars as i write this.  If no buyer comes forward in a reasonable interval, then drop it to 8L per square meter, and so on. 

Then let it be a Watcher's Game, but a fair one that everyone can observe!

 

[IvanTwin Rogers]

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

People use the word "bot" in relation to anything concerning SL that's automated. But I wouldn't call an auto-bidder a bot because it's simply a programme. Having said that, search engine crawlers/spiders are sometimes called robots. In fact, a file called 'robots.txt' is a web standard for handling search engine spiders/crawlers/robots. It's just that, when it concerns SL, the word 'bot' is all too readily used, imo.

I've written quite a lot of programmes that access the web and do various things, like searches on search engines, submitting auto-generated pages to search engines, fetching pages that appear in search results - mostly stuff to do with search engines - including SL's search engine. If I was writing an auto-bidder, it would automatically log in, fetch the relevant page, ascertain the current bid, place a bid if desireable, and so on. It would do everything necessary to watch the current bid and bid itself - up to a maximum, of course.

In other words, it would automate what I would do by hand if I didn't have the programme and, because of that, I don't think LL would do anything to anyone who used such a programme in the auction. I may be wrong, but I doubt they would do anything.

 

---

ha, your dont know to much second life, let me say my experience in my horrible english, is poor., well one day, i put my land for sale for 1 linden for error, lol, and in a 2 second a bot get the land inmediatly, 2 sec, tazz i lost my lovely land, they give my land back in 10k when i send a im to a horrible griefer seller for the error so second life have a automatic programs and to much peoples griefers and gold farmers use this programs for take advange of second life.

[Qie Niangao]

If I were a flipper, I'd do the one-shot level of automation, just so I could hit all the auctions I wanted to bid on all within a few minutes of closing. The problem with trying to get any smarter about it is that there's no way of synchronizing your own clock with the auction server's, and everything happens in those last few minutes. An automated bidding program might get a chance to raise its own bid in response to a counterbid, but with imperfect knowledge of the cutoff time, it would be risky to place that earlier bid at anything less than the intended limit. Even if one thought some strategy of bidding could "psych out" the other bidders, there's not much time for the out-psyching to have an effect.

[emilia Avindar]

YE, exactly, IvanTwin!  A couple of years ago, when land was selling at higher prices, i decided to play with the price of a 512 parcel that was not moving.  It was the only parcel for sale in several regions thereabouts, and had ideal location.  I set it down to 2500linden and an av set down behind me and i didn't even see it. I was already in the About Land tabs trying to set the price back to 3500 when my objects came flying back.

When i closed the About Land tab, i saw a scrawny, silent figure hovering mindlessly--the new owner, a "landbot"... and despite that these are arguably still "real" people, all evidence was that it did not speak when spoken to and had no purpose other than teleporting to and buying land.

In that case, i just accepted that i found the bottom of land pricing on that continent at that time.  Looking back, it was not like i was robbed at all, but it would be awful to be trying to set land for sale and have some kind of distraction or mis-type, because YES, they are so swift to the site, you cannot undo it fast enough to stop the sale. I'm glad if you had a good outcome on your event.

When i was truly a noob, and when land was sometimes posted to the US Dollars bidding board, i had a little problem the first time i ever used the Auction board that the Lindens did respond to immediately.  For that and a couple of other small assists, i will always be grateful.  I'm pretty sure that great Customer Service kept me in SL and in the land game, where it would be easy to get totally frustrated.  People always respond better when there is a perception of fairness.  So, when i learn a hard lesson, i am also quick to share it because i like to prevent someone else from learning the hard way! Thanks so much for your thoughts.

[Dillon Levenque]

No consolation on your failed bid, but that really was a well-written OP. Expressive, informative, interesting, and complete.

I also enjoyed learning a little more SL history from both your contributions and Qie's.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

 

I also enjoyed learning a little more SL history from both your contributions and Qie's.

---

Same here   I had never heard of Clyde.  I recall references to The Outlands years ago but never had reason to check it out

I seriously need to start exploring again - beginning with Mainland historical sites.

[Pussycat Catnap]

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

 

The better way is to enter a maximum amount you are willing to pay. If someone outbids your current bid, the system bids again for you, but only the smallest allowable increase. And it does that until it reaches your maximum. If somone outbids your maximum, you lost, but you're content that haven't paid more that you are willing to pay. I'm sure that the auction system operates a maximum. I'm sure it used to, anyway - unless my memory is totally wrong.

---

But that logic only makes sense in a world of rational actors. There is no such thing.

People will bid what they feel it is worth, what they are willing to pay. Then when they realize others have an interest as well, they go through a battle of emotions that leads to either resentment, despair and walking away, realizing it wasn't of interest, or fighting tooth and claw because the emotional value of it has just been driven up.

Looks like the OP got caught in the tooth and claw, and didn't fight fast enough or hard enough.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

emilia Avindar wrote:

Hello Phil, yes it's called your proxy amount--after a couple of bidding rounds, i raised it to 20,000 Linden but i remained the winning bid at considerably less than that until 11:57am.  At the last moment, my pangs of potential defeat made me try to raise it quickly to a bit higher, and while that would have been an emotional bid, it would have possibly left me the winner of the parcel.  However, i am told elsewhere that the winner probably used a bot to generate the winning bid anyway.  Does anyone know anything about this? And would such a macro be able to generate bids at the last moment? I fear a macro could in fact test the winning bid without taking the big proxy bid steps most of us use when we really want to win. It is true that your proxy bid may be ridiculously high and yet you win at a much lower price because no other bidder comes forward to test it, or at least not in the time it would take to attempt all those small steps.

However, this is not the first time i have lost at the last moment, and it does make me wonder if the landflippers use macros to outbid at the last moment.  If anyone has any knowledge of this practice, i ask you to comment here, because perhaps there needs to be a corrective action.

SUGGESTION--**LIMIT THE BIDDING INTERVAL TO ONE BID PER PARCEL PER HOUR**  ...this would not keep the bidder from bidding at the last moment, but it would force them to bid in ONLY ONE STEP, not to use a macro to climb up to the winning proxy bid.  This would encourage each bidder to give a reasonable proxy bid to stay in the bidding, so that it is not a robot's game at 11:57am SLT.

 

---

It didn't have to be a macro by any means. Three minutes to close is an eternity with online auctions. On Ebay, if you really want something it's best to type in your maximum bid in the entry field and wait until there are SECONDS left, watching the web page like a hawk and updating it often. Then you hit "Return" with just enough time left to hit the confirm button that will pop up. I've ninja'd stuff at the last second; I've been ninja'd myself.

[emilia Avindar]

Thank you and everyone for your thoughts, please drop in to "The Outands" anytime, because all of Clyde is welcoming, and as you know, some of it is for sale.

 

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Clyde/185/64/38

[Phil Deakins]

---

IvanTwin Rogers wrote:

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

People use the word "bot" in relation to anything concerning SL that's automated. But I wouldn't call an auto-bidder a bot because it's simply a programme. Having said that, search engine crawlers/spiders are sometimes called robots. In fact, a file called 'robots.txt' is a web standard for handling search engine spiders/crawlers/robots. It's just that, when it concerns SL, the word 'bot' is all too readily used, imo.

I've written quite a lot of programmes that access the web and do various things, like searches on search engines, submitting auto-generated pages to search engines, fetching pages that appear in search results - mostly stuff to do with search engines - including SL's search engine. If I was writing an auto-bidder, it would automatically log in, fetch the relevant page, ascertain the current bid, place a bid if desireable, and so on. It would do everything necessary to watch the current bid and bid itself - up to a maximum, of course.

In other words, it would automate what I would do by hand if I didn't have the programme and, because of that, I don't think LL would do anything to anyone who used such a programme in the auction. I may be wrong, but I doubt they would do anything. 

---

ha, your dont know to much second life

, let me say my experience in my horrible english, is poor., well one day, i put my land for sale for 1 linden for error, lol, and in a 2 second a bot get the land inmediatly, 2 sec, tazz i lost my lovely land, they give my land back in 10k when i send a im to a horrible griefer seller for the error so second life have a automatic programs and to much peoples griefers and gold farmers use this programs for take advange of second life.

---

No? I think it's the other way round. What you wrote has nothing to do with what I wrote. You are right about your english being poor though

[Phil Deakins]

---

Pussycat Catnap wrote:

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

 

The better way is to enter a maximum amount you are willing to pay. If someone outbids your current bid, the system bids again for you, but only the smallest allowable increase. And it does that until it reaches your maximum. If somone outbids your maximum, you lost, but you're content that haven't paid more that you are willing to pay. I'm sure that the auction system operates a maximum. I'm sure it used to, anyway - unless my memory is totally wrong.

---

But that logic only makes sense in a world of rational actors. There is no such thing.

People will bid what they feel it is worth, what they are willing to pay. Then when they realize others have an interest as well, they go through a battle of emotions that leads to either resentment, despair and walking away, realizing it wasn't of interest, or fighting tooth and claw because the emotional value of it has just been driven up.

Looks like the OP got caught in the tooth and claw, and didn't fight fast enough or hard enough. 

---

It does work though. It's up to the would-be buyer to, in the cold light of day, work out the maximum that s/he is willing to pay, and accept that they weren't willing to pay enough if they lose.

[Phil Deakins]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

If I were a flipper, I'd do the one-shot level of automation, just so I could hit all the auctions I wanted to bid on all within a few minutes of closing. The problem with trying to get any smarter about it is that there's no way of synchronizing your own clock with the auction server's, and everything happens in those last few minutes. An automated bidding program

might

get a chance to raise its own bid in response to a counterbid, but with imperfect knowledge of the cutoff time, it would be risky to place that earlier bid at anything less than the intended limit. Even if one thought some strategy of bidding could "psych out" the other bidders, there's not much time for the out-psyching to have an effect.

---

As a flipper, it wouldn't matter if you lost most of the auctions you targeted, as long as you won some of them sometimes.

[Qie Niangao]

Sure, but there would need to be some benefit to first bidding less than the amount one is willing to pay, and then adjusting the bid upwards in response to other bids. The only advantage I can see to such a strategy would be to somehow decrease those counterbids, and I don't think there's time for that effect--assuming it would happen at all--even if the other bidders are also automated.

It would be very different if bids were for a fixed sum instead of limits. Then, yeah, a fast bot could avoid paying more than necessary.

[Conifer Dada]

What surprises me about this is that there are still land flippers in SL!   All around my home there are large and small plots of abandoned land, all for sale at LS1 per sq m - and not selling for weeks and weeks.

 

[Melita Magic]

There is definitely an 'art' to SL land auctions.

Unfortunately there are some mercenary bidders out there. They HOPE to nab a piece of land someone else wants very badly and then gouge them so badly it hurts their as yet unborn grandkids.

Case in point. As a novice bidder I went after a half sim that suddenly opened up in front of my Dallows land. I had only discovered it by accident. One day I was checking out the area and had "view land owners" on. That land showed purple, which means, up for auction. I visited the SL auction page and sure enough: The entire sim was up for bids, divided in halves. Since it was unblockable ocean land, it attracted some heavy bidding. 

I was in way over my head. Way too early in bidding I put in an absurdly high maximum bid, thinking I could sleep peacefully on it that way. Well, the problem was, so did some others. Soon, that absurd bid was maxed out - and others were still bidding. My stomach fell. I didn't sleep the rest of that night. 

I kept checking on the auction and I'd add a little bit every so often when someone else snuck in a bid. That maxed out each time. I thought, who else wants this so badly and why? It wasn't just that our max bids dueled and lost; they kept adding to theirs in live bids. I could tell because of how quickly tehir max changed. 

Turned out to be a professional land flipper. They told me later they paid bills this way. I can see why. Their outlook was one of a gambler. They played hard, risked a lot, and probably usually won. They could tell the other bidder really wantd that property. 

I wish I could say I let them hang with it. I wish I could say they got stuck with it and ended up paying so much tier they choked on it. But, no. I ended up paying an INSANE amount in RL money to the winning bidder; they grabbed it out from under me with seconds to spare. Either way I was already going to lose money since I only wanted it to maintain a protected view and had no commercial plans for that land. To this day except an occasioanl thing like a meeroo nest or a 20L gatcha it has not been commercialized.

The person who won the other half, which due to the bidding war, I could not even think about bidding on, ALSO sought to flip it. They were a bit arrogant about it, and I had already been stung once so I wasn't playing. They still tried to price gouge me for it; they were feeling the heat due to VAT and a new month's tier coming  up for them. They ended up reselling it on the cheap last minute, I think. Too bad they hadn't offered me that same discounted price I might've taken it. But the person who bought it has been a good neighbor. 

My other rancid experience was in trying to get land in the former teen grid. Every time things were up for bids, it was ridiculous. I had already vowed to never be a sucker again. Finally one weekend the habitual bidder must've been out of town or something and AFK, because FINALLY bids were in a sane realm (although still very pricey by normal land standards.) I managed to get a couple of plots. I could've had a third, but I left that one in case someone else was also trying to get reasonably priced land. Now I wish I had bought it because a flipper got it the next time it went up for auction instead, (the second bidder, who won, must've defaulted?) and that person ended up owning most of the former TG. They only wanted $150L a meter for resale, so they were not greedy, right?

The whole game makes me sick to be honest, but they could care less about us or the community, maybe that's why it makes me sick actually. They could care less about any of us or the community. They want their money.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

I happen to know one of the land flippers who 'bought up most of the former TG', and also a lot of Zindra.

That person -will- price very high, and also hold a lot of lots in reserve without selling, and rent some. And bids very agressively.

But I would not say they don't care about the community. My conversations and long friendship have revealed to me that while they have a different perspective on it than I do, they care a lot. Part of why they do what they do is out of concern for the look of SL.

I'm come to learn that a number of these flippers hold large amounts of land in reserve for no other reason than to prevent the 'fugly' builds with spammy junk from taking over in areas they are concerned about.

I've also seen two flippers "go at it" against each other trying to destroy the other's idea of what land should be like in an area - what will happen if you get a 'slice and dice flipper' colliding against a 'preserve for high aesthetic value' flipper.