Is This Summer's Sales Slump Worse Than Usual?

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm still trying to figure this out, and perhaps it won't matter in a few weeks, but here are some data points, that may add up, or may not:

o A ubiquitous rental company puts an entire sim for sale for $1.6 a meter -- an amazing price for a whole flat green sim. It sells pretty fast, within a week, but to end users, big families.

o A long-time rental agency puts prices down to .55/prim -- and I thought .66 was low.

o A huge land seller is putting Zindra (adult land) that is usually priced very high to only $7/m or $8/m -- and nobody is buying.

o Moth continent waterfront that was getting back up to $10/m or higher is going down to $9 or even less again, even $7 (by that large land seller)

o You can get into merchants' events that usually are so crowded it takes 3 days to get into them

o There seem to be a lot more 50% off sales

I could add more...

Edited August 21, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Garnet Psaltery]

A reduction in those inflated prices is welcome but the overall trend doesn't seem encouraging.  It might change in a few weeks, as you say, but we have to hope the people who stayed away for summer remember to come back.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

 A ubiquitous rental company puts an entire sim for sale for $1.6 a meter -- an amazing price for a whole flat green sim. It sells pretty fast, within a week, but to end users, big families.

 A long-time rental agency puts prices down to .55/prim -- and I thought .66 was low.

 A huge land seller is putting Zindra (adult land) that is usually priced very high to only $7/m or $8/m -- and nobody is buying.

 Moth continent waterfront that was getting back up to $10/m or higher is going down to $9 or even less again, even $7 (by that large land seller)

LL dropped the price of land and added more LI, this is just the natural response for their potential customers. 

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You can get into merchants' events that usually are so crowded it takes 3 days to get into them

There seem to be a lot more 50% off sales

I never really had much difficulty getting onto events, perhaps its the times you try to get in? 

Summer is a time for sales.. Always has been. Still not sure what anything you have said defines a "sales slump." I haven't had any less sales this summer, just the opposite really. Perhaps a few merchants will respond with how they have done so far this summer?

[Sandy Schnook]

Summer in SL is always slower.  People go out in RL and do things.  Vacations, picnics, barbeques, etc.  

[animats]

Land auctions for user owned land are coming. Sellers hate to reduce their asking prices, but it's not a real price if nobody is buying. Auctions will shake that up.

[Skyspinner Soulstar]

It seems so to me.... There are so many parcels for sale! the world map is yellow just about everywhere.

[Phorumities]

14 minutes ago, Skyspinner Soulstar said:

It seems so to me.... There are so many parcels for sale! the world map is yellow just about everywhere.

those yellow squares all represent tier being paid to LL. whos business is it of anyone if people chose to live on their parcels or try to sell them and make some money, the possibility of profit dwindling of course as the tier date is reached each month.

Kudos to all those flippers for helping support LL's profitability.

Edited August 24, 2018 by Phorumities
fixed a word

[Garnet Psaltery]

It's true that the landowners are paying tier, so in one respect it's good news for LL, but stagnation is not encouraging for residents.

[Coffee Pancake]

Land prices are being held artificially high as flippers have to factor in the holding costs. The longer they hold a plot, the higher the price or they take a loss. Adult land is especially vulnerable at the moment, Zindra has a couple of land owners on the hook for almost all the yellow land, Horizons has some shocking prices with many people having overpaid for parcels they thought could be flipped for a quick profit sitting as empty as the day LL released them. (Horizons default buildings are a dead giveaway that a parcel has only ever been owned by flippers).

If the SSP regions turn out to be a new mainland continent it's going to be a bloodbath.

[Qie Niangao]

I'm seeing much less abandoned Mainland than there used to be, thanks to the increase in Premium bonus from 512 to 1024 sq.m. That change suddenly put every Premium member in the potential market for a larger parcel (or an additional parcel), and for a while land prices spiked. What I've seen so far is a return to earlier prices now that the Lab has satisfied pretty much every request for selling abandoned land to anybody who asks. In fact, we shouldn't be surprised to see something of a glut -- more land for sale rather than abandoned, with supply-driven price reductions -- as the market corrects for over-enthusiastic buying by flippers during the boom, and maybe some old parcels for sale after owners got something more befitting their newly expanded tier allotment.

My experience is mostly on the Atoll, but I assume something like that will be happening elsewhere -- except maybe Zindra, a market that has never made much sense to me.

[Phorumities]

11 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Land prices are being held artificially high as flippers have to factor in the holding costs. The longer they hold a plot, the higher the price or they take a loss. Adult land is especially vulnerable at the moment, Zindra has a couple of land owners on the hook for almost all the yellow land, Horizons has some shocking prices with many people having overpaid for parcels they thought could be flipped for a quick profit sitting as empty as the day LL released them. (Horizons default buildings are a dead giveaway that a parcel has only ever been owned by flippers).

If the SSP regions turn out to be a new mainland continent it's going to be a bloodbath.

is it possible that horizons is as big as it is because land flippers kept buying the parcels as fast as they came online. 

I can imagine a convo in a LL meeting....

can you believe those flippers buying up every parcel?

yep its crazy but as long as they keep buying lets keep putting more online.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

14 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'm seeing much less abandoned Mainland than there used to be, thanks to the increase in Premium bonus from 512 to 1024 sq.m.

and the new auction house.

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, Phorumities said:

is it possible that horizons is as big as it is because land flippers kept buying the parcels as fast as they came online. 

I can imagine a convo in a LL meeting....

can you believe those flippers buying up every parcel?

yep its crazy but as long as they keep buying lets keep putting more online.

Horizons is pretty much the same size as it was at launch. Flippers just hoovered it all up and its way worse than it looks at first glance. They are actually holding large amounts of land and not putting it up for sale in order to keep the prices high. Spend a few minutes inspecting who owns empty land or land with default houses on it ... 

[Prokofy Neva]

The point is not THAT there is a summer slump. That's a given when people go outdoors in real life or take vacations in general. The point is to find out if this is worse than others. There have been some really bad gulches in the past, and I don't think this is the worst one.

There's been a lot more selling of land, but I don't think the additional tier and lower prices account for waterfront and Zindra selling for so much lower, even now. So perhaps it's the story of one big business, or maybe it is a move in anticipation of the auctions changing.

With this move, it is my fervent hope that the Lindens will go back to publicizing the names of the auction winners and all those who bid. LL did that at one time, and it was a deterrent of sorts to major flooding of the auctions to drive up prices. To be sure, it is only a social constraint in that people can ostracize companies that do that, but it's something.

I've just finished reading Frank Norris' novel The Pit published in 1902, which is about the Chicago wheat trading board more than a century ago, when one big buyer could corner the market and change prices and fates all around the world -- and then crash big-time. The protagonist essentially makes an anonymous account to take over the bull market and corner wheat, then spectacularly crashes. The Pit doesn't exist anymore due to the Internet, and there is more regulation. But The Pit is a lot like the SL land auction and land market in general.

I was thinking there might be a rush of avatars into the new land auction format, but maybe not -- it might be that end users who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the increased tier system may have bought up what they want/need now and won't be selling soon. If anything, the same people who flood the auctions now to drive up prices will flood it with single parcels and will have the time and money to do this. It will be hard to get attention to the smaller fry. It will be interesting to see how many flooder/flippers are really in the game. Will at least these resident parcels for sale now have publicity as to who the owner is? At least you should be able to go in world and see, and we'll know soon enough if it is all land barons.

I'm always amazed when I have new customers during slump times but I usually adjust by advertising more -- and that always lets me know how difficult advertising is with no Linden wide billboard system and no ability to purchase ads at infohubs and welcome areas as we used to be able to do in the old LL-run telehubs (2-week ads for a set price, first come first served). The Lindens should really bring that back. Often a new customer will log-off immediately after renting, exhausted, and tell me they were searching long and hard and late until they found my rental, then they collapsed. And that shouldn't happen. BTW there are resident-run options like Rental Central that has a wide variety of rental agencies available to browse but search and classifieds aren't enough.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Phorumities said:

those yellow squares all represent tier being paid to LL. whos business is it of anyone if people chose to live on their parcels or try to sell them and make some money, the possibility of profit dwindling of course as the tier date is reached each month.

Kudos to all those flippers for helping support LL's profitability.

I don't believe in banning flippers and there is nothing illegal or immoral about buying and selling land to a willing buyer for any price the market will bear.

I do believe, however, in publicity of land titles, as in real life, so that the consumer can decide whether he wants to buy overpriced land that got that way because of flooding the auctions or cornering the market.

Capitalism is legal and moral and so are consumer boycotts.

We don't really have a free economy because the Lindens control the land supply, the free tier, the LindEx and of course the media.

[Coffee Pancake]

4 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

With this move, it is my fervent hope that the Lindens will go back to publicizing the names of the auction winners and all those who bid. LL did that at one time, and it was a deterrent of sorts to major flooding of the auctions to drive up prices. To be sure, it is only a social constraint in that people can ostracize companies that do that, but it's something.

Names will do nothing to expose companies buying everything .. if they wanted to hide, it's fairly trivial to do so.

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, CoffeeDujour said:

Names will do nothing to expose companies buying everything .. if they wanted to hide, it's fairly trivial to do so.

No, because even if the flooders make a series of alts for the auctions, if they want brand recognition and advertising inworld, they have to use a persistent name to sell the land, so you would still see ultimately who the seller is. It's also trivial to research alts in this manner, too. The Lindens publicized the names before, you could readily see the patterns, and draw your own conclusions, and that's a good thing.

[Coffee Pancake]

Who would go to that much trouble ? That's pretty stalkerish .. 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Just to point out... It's only summer in half the world.. So, half the world ISN'T going on vacations and taking time off...

 

[Coffee Pancake]

True, but the other half of the world are only minimally active in SL. Might have something do with the servers being on the other side of the globe.

Hopefully something the stated long term goal of cloud based regions with the option for local hosting will help to address, although it's probably too little too late for those markets.

[Phorumities]

On 8/22/2018 at 6:01 PM, animats said:

Land auctions for user owned land are coming. Sellers hate to reduce their asking prices, but it's not a real price if nobody is buying. Auctions will shake that up.

In the auctions land flippers end up buying all the desirable parcels, what makes you think private auctions will be any different.

It's at least good now that flippers have to put up the bid money instead of playing multiple auctions and then only having to buy Lindens for the ones they win

[Chic Aeon]

While this has little to do with LAND, I have been amazed at my August sales -- way better than normal for summer  in general and way better than I expected. So people are still BUYING -- and my products do directly relate to land sales as they are H and G.

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

While this has little to do with LAND, I have been amazed at my August sales -- way better than normal for summer  in general and way better than I expected. So people are still BUYING -- and my products do directly relate to land sales as they are H and G.

 

 

Did you have 50% off sales?

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

Just to point out... It's only summer in half the world.. So, half the world ISN'T going on vacations and taking time off...

 

The SL population isn't split evenly between "halves of the world," however. The overwhelming majority of repeat log-ons come from the North America and Western Europe. 

[Chic Aeon]

8 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Did you have 50% off sales?

No sales. No group. No gifts. No hunts

Aside for camping on my building pad to catch messages I haven't actually done much in SL at all this month. 

I had a very good gacha event round and also did very well at Cosmo and selling more than usual on the Marketplace. 

It "may" be (I only have a hunch about this) that the MARKETPLACE sales were from Sansar folks buying my stuff HERE that they saw THERE since I sold a lot of those items, more than usual. hat doesn't account for other sales.  Other than that -- no clue.

Kitely is also doing very  well.  Store sales are also better than they have been in awhile. 

 

Edited August 24, 2018 by Chic Aeon