What is happening in real estate? Every one is abandoning there lots around me or are for sale.

[MartinShadowmoon]

Howdy, love second life and its idea. But I spent a lot of money on land. Now all around me for as far as I can see. Either people are abandoning there lots. Or thay are empty and for sale. Even lots that do have some thing, no one is around. Feels like a sinking ship, a mmorp with no subscribers and players. Whats up with the real eastate market? Been trying to sell for ages I wanted to relocate. This is really sad to me, cause if I could sell my lot id buy another in a more flat area. I just dont know what to do, I would like my money back. But there gets to a breaking point where you say cut you losses. Well hope what ever is happening gets fixed cause the real estate is looking really bad. Any way got two nice lots for sale one bordering LL property. Off the beach I just want out! 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I can't say what is going on generally on the mainland market.  I have a home on the Blake Sea and haven't noticed what you are saying.  Maybe others can offer you insight.  It could be people just leaving your sim for bigger parcels or better located ones.

Its not unusual not to see people at their homes near you when you are at yours.  Time zone differ, interests differ, they may be online but out at a club or visiting friends etc.  A private estate region that is all rented out is the same way.  It's always been that way even in the heyday of SL. 

Put your lot for sale in the Mainland for sale category in the Land Forums.  Put a SLurl in the ad so people can TP there to see it and also the square meter size, number of prims the lot supports and your asking price.  Also put a listing on the Marketplace. 

Realize that you may not get what you paid for it, especially if it's not in a prime location like sailable waterfront.  For a quick sale, price it lower than similar parcels. If you don't sell it before the next tier is due and don't want to pay more tier, then you'll have to abandon it, of course.

You won't get any money back, as anything you bought from LL, including tier paid is non refundable under the TOS.  Of course it's the same story with anything you paid for the parcel if you bought it from someone other than LL as all land sales are final too.

[ChinRey]

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MartinShadowmoon wrote:

Howdy, love second life and its idea. But I spent a lot of money on land. Now all around me for as far as I can see. Either people are abandoning there lots. Or thay are empty and for sale.

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There's nothing new about that, it's been going down slowly but steadily since 2011. There's some indications that the decline has slowed down a little bit the last few months but don't expect the curve to ever rise again.

It's easy to see why: there are fewer and fewer people in SL and with focus shifting more and more from the landscape to the avatar, the average user needs less land. There is no reliable recent statistics of abandoned mainland but according to gridsurvey.com, the number of pirvate sims has dropped by slightly more than 25% since 2011. Mainland seems to hold on a little bit better but not much.

There still seems to be more demand for than supply of land connected to the Blake Sea and to some extent land connected to the waterways around and across Sansara. And formally or informally themed areas tend to hold on quite well, some even manage to grow.

But if you want to sell a piece of "generic" Second Life land, don't expect much.

[Alazarin Mondrian]

If you can't sell your current land, then contact the seller of the land you want to buy and see if they're amenable to a swap deal. FWIW, I've been surrounded by abandoned land on all sides for years and it's been quite a gift for me as I have a tendency to build large, sprawling projects that spread out over my meagre parcel boundaries. The few neighbours that I do have come from very different time zones than I do in RL so our paths rarely cross. So:

1]  Having abandoned land around you can be a blessing. You can build big and push out over your parcel limits [so long as you remember to anchor the root prims on your parcel] and no-one's going to complain.

2] Remember that people from all over the world use Second Life. Not everyone will come from a time zone that overlaps with yours. I frequent some very popular RP regions that are often close to deserted when I visit simply because the bulk of their userbase / membership come from timezones far removed from mine.

[Klytyna]

There is a piece of old market terminology most people today don't know too well...

 

Bubble.

Sl Maionland has been in a bubble for some years. Problem goes like this.

 

Some abandoned land worth 10k ls, goes on sale, and a professional market shark snaps it up at that price in the auction, because he knows the amateur 'i can get righ off land' fools will try to shave a couple of k.

 

He then puffs it up in the description with a lot of obsolete bull about "ocean view" (edge of a continent) or "road access" (nobody uses the damn roads since tp anywhere came in) and so on, I once saw a parcel puffed up by saying it was "only 3 sims by road from the Phil Linden Memorial Sports Complex".

 

This allows him to sell it to somew gullible free market fallacy believer who THINKSD 20k is a 'real bargain and a chance to get rich quick off land"

Of course, when said fool tries to sell it for 30k it doesn't sell, and free market fallacy believers are stubborn, they cannot accept that they can't make money, and will cling stubbornly to their over priced land paying tier month after month desperate to avoid the shame of negativ e equity at any cost.

 

Eventually they give up and... Parcel Abandoned to Gov Linden...

 

The sisuation isn't helped by the fact that you can get land on private regions for a fraction of the buy/rent costs of mad-mainland, and can do so without being 'premium'.

 

Thats why 60% of most of the mainland continents is empty, supply greatly exceeds demand, blake sea is different, people WANT that for the sailing and flying etc. some scruffy hillside with so so views of the world ocean, meh...

 

Bubble prices will remain inflated and sales poor as long as free market fallacy people refuse to bite the bullet and move on, accepting they were screwed over by professional predators almost as soon as they looked into 'investing in land'. 

 

19th Century RL get rich quick schemes do NOT work in 21st Century SL. The only way to get rich of land in SL is buy private sims and rent to people who wont't pay stupid mainland prices.

[ChinRey]

I agree with all you say except for one thing: the situation is just as bad for private sims, the gridsurvey.com statistics are very clear there.

The only real difference is that you don't see abandoned private sims because they aren't there anymore.

[Pussycat Catnap]

There are 50,344 people logged in to SL right now as I type this. On the population tracker I have not reset since 2010, the highest it has ever seen was 73,721 - and that was in it's first three months of use somewhen...

On average since then, it's been in the mid 40,000s. Lately it's average has actually gone up a little - but that's a subjective feeling rather than something I can prove.

 

SL's userbase isn't fading.

 

But the reasons to own land are mostly gone.

Marketplace killed the need for many people to have inworld shops. Many still do because it is a very strong branding tool to have a place for people to go to - but only if you make that shop appealing and low lag and geared to sell product (good displays that are easy to work with for the new and top selling items).

- and many of the shops still in SL fail to actually brand well. But these tend to just be 'labors of love' or 'failed business sense' or from forgotten accounts that somehow managed to pay the bills.

Residential needs are met for many by linden homes - those still have decent occupancy (but are by no means full anymore). Others often just rent spots on themes or 'cheap by volume' estates and mainland rental spots.

(By cheap by volume I mean those sims that often have a giant series of walls blocking off several lots, and people rent their corner/fraction and just pretend like there's nothing beyond that wall. the giant mega-land barons have plenty of these. Much as I see them as eyesores, they remain popular so clearly my opinion of them is not in sync with the SL community.)

And the number of SLers that keep an SL home seems to be low (this is a personal opinion I cannot prove).

 

As to SL mainland... it's attraction has dropped for many over the years.

People often don't understand what you get for a premium account very well. I see questions on this quite frequently. Many Linden Home people don't even realize they could go to mainland.

Many people overestimate the costs of mainland. See a parcel for $20,000 and balk - that is $80 US dollars after all. But then they spend $30,000L that month at a gatcha faire + rental on a sim they don't like. What people find value in changes over time... and shopping at events seems to be where the SL economy is now.

In other places SL land barons have artifically kept prices high (think Zindra), so actual land owners also try to sell high, and when no one bites, they abandon before instead lowering price down... A good number of empty parcels are actually also NOT abandoned land, but being held by land barons in 'reserve' for reasons I don't really understand.

 

One of the plots right next to my SL home is for sale for $195,000L. It's less than 1500sqm, but double prim.

- The land baron prices it like this, but puts a rental box on it. In the time I've had my SL home, one person rented it for about 1 month. It is right next to another lot that was in the same price range, and is currently rented. This same land baron keeps prices like this all over Zindra - that seriously discourages even people who want to buy and keep land, like me, from doing so...

Most of the land I own, I lucked into. Like the double prim land that is my home that I grabbed for $30,000 because a different land baron was holding it.

- But a LOT of people in SL would not even pay $30,000 for a double prim lot, when you consider that you could buy about 480 gatchas at '[insert monthly event name here] with that money (Gatchas seem to be mostly priced these days at $50L or $75L, so I used 62.5 for that number)...

In 2009 if I told people to go buy a huge stack of no-mod no-copy items that I refused to tell them what they got until after they paid me... I would have been laughed at and maybe even a few folks would have filed AR's against me for 'drama reasons'...

But that's what everyone does now.

In 2009, if I offered you a 1024 double prim lot on a sim with only 4 parcels on it and a wide open view, for $30,000 - people would be fighting each other to pay me for it.

But today I could list it and sit there for weeks before it got a buyer. Unless I left a hundred gatchas on the lot to be transfered with the purchase...

 

[ChinRey]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

SL's userbase isn't fading.

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Here are the stats from gridsurvey.com

A slow but relatively steady decline, a little bit ahead of and less steep than the decline in grid size, which is what one should expect.

This is of course the number of accounts logged in, not the number of actual people. There are several reasons to believe that the amount of bots and mulitple alts logged on simultaneously increases but no reliable data of course so we don't know.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

As to SL mainland... it's attraction has dropped for many over the years.

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It would be interesting to compare the decline of mainland to the decline of private sims. As I said in my previous post, I think it's about the same but with no recent statistics over abandoned land, there's jsut no way of knowing.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

SL's userbase isn't fading.

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Here are the stats from gridsurvey.com

A slow but relatively steady decline, a little bit ahead of and less steep than the decline in grid size, which is what one should expect.

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That's not what I see. I see a generally flat line in the overal shape after 2010. Which is fairly close to the point I was making.

 

[Rhonda Huntress]

A relatively flat line with a downward slope, I'll go with that.  20% decline over 7 years is not bad at all  If you can add 2 to 3% increase annually you could eliminate that decline entirely.  But then again I am compairing that to my industry where we need 7 to 12% new production every year to maintain flat production level.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

 I think a lot of it has to do with people paying the lower tiers and others having to pay the high new rate. It is really unfair and I talk to a lot of people who just refuse to be exploited in such a way as to have two levels of payments. Linden labs can certainly turn around this if they would see this. But as I understand they probably do not care much anymore as they focus on new avenues of money flow. I never see any advertising about SL on television or media unless its in those dang ad choices ads online.

 

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

SL's userbase isn't fading.

---

Here are the stats from gridsurvey.com

A slow but relatively steady decline, a little bit ahead of and less steep than the decline in grid size, which is what one should expect.

This is of course the number of accounts logged in, not the number of actual people. There are several reasons to believe that the amount of bots and mulitple alts logged on simultaneously increases but no reliable data of course so we don't know.

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

As to SL mainland... it's attraction has dropped for many over the years.

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It would be interesting to compare the decline of mainland to the decline of private sims. As I said in my previous post, I think it's about the same but with no recent statistics over abandoned land, there's jsut no way of knowing.

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Now compare Second LIfe to another older, continuous online environment, World of Warcraft:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/

Here are similar numbers for Eve Online over the last few years - the huge upward spike at the end of 2016 was the introduction of a free-to-play version:

[ChinRey]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Now compare Second LIfe to another older, continuous online environment, World of Warcraft:

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Oh yes, it's certainly not an SL-only phenomena. Any online game/forum/whatever that doesn't manage to renew itself will decline.

There is one crucial difference though. There are lots of more recent and modern MMORPG games but even today Second Life is the only thing that can possibly be regarded as a virtual world. All the other generic virtual realities I've ever heard of - existing ones, defunct ones and planned ones - are focusing on single stand-alone experiences. If Second Life dies, the whole idea of a continuous virtual world dies with it. After all is said and done, that's why I'm still here.