What is a Land Baron?

[Feorie Frimon]

We all know the term and it gets thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean? 
 

What are the conditions of one being a Land Baron? 

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

I save it for the ones who not only buy and sell a lot, but jack up the prices ridiculously sky high. For instance, a recent example is a parcel I saw selling for L$3,000 here in the forums. The person who bought it has relisted it for $49,999.

It's definitely not a compliment when I use the term.  

Edited January 20, 2022 by Sylvia Tamalyn

[InnerCity Elf]

To me, it just means "someone owning a whole lot of land", which may or may not include people buying land for L$3000 and putting it up for L$49,999, depending on how much land in total they own.

Those, I'd call land speculators, or maybe land mongers, sounds funnier and matches the land baron terminology better

[Soull Starlight]

I agree with Sylvia. I think the 'barons' are those who buy up land without concern of the surrounding land/community, with the sole intention of reselling at the highest profit they can muster.

Far more nefarious than landowners, who might have the same amount of land holdings as a baron but works with/in communities to create and share. 

[Kristaki Hudson]

Well basically Landbaron is the term used to whom owns lands in the Linden Continents which must be under rule of premium account and the Term Landlord is used for whom owns Private islands which are not under a premium account.

 

[Kathlen Onyx]

18 hours ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

I save it for the ones who not only buy and sell a lot, but jack up the prices ridiculously sky high. For instance, a recent example is a parcel I saw selling for L$3,000 here in the forums. The person who bought it has relisted it for $49,999.

It's definitely not a compliment when I use the term.  

It must be profitable though or they wouldn't do it.  The problem is that people continue to pay these ridiculous prices which adds to the problem.  it's just like RL. Buy low, sell high. If it's working why would they stop?

[Marigold Devin]

20 hours ago, Feorie Frimon said:

We all know the term and it gets thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean? 
 

What are the conditions of one being a Land Baron? 

Land baron is a term I always associate with dodgy dealings and land bots.  They would have these - what I thought were very spooky when I first saw them - bots just hovering in the sky randomly, just waiting to pick up cheap land. They got a bad name for various reasons, one of them being if someone intended to sell their land to another person for a token amount, say 1L$, but forgot to specify a person's name, within the blink of an eye a land bot would have swooped in and claimed ownership of that land.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

2 hours ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:

It must be profitable though or they wouldn't do it.  The problem is that people continue to pay these ridiculous prices which adds to the problem.  it's just like RL. Buy low, sell high. If it's working why would they stop?

That's a lot of my problem with them, actually. I think that newer residents may get taken advantage of, because they don't realize they are being fleeced by the inflated prices. Of course I don't expect these sellers to have any moral issue with what they are doing, because they are indeed making money.

Now, if people who have lots of land experience choose to pay an inflated rate for a parcel because it's worth it to them for whatever reason, then whatever floats their boat, as long as they know they are paying too much. I don't care for the "rob the noobs" aspect that I suspect happens fairly frequently. 

Edited January 21, 2022 by Sylvia Tamalyn

[Kathlen Onyx]

7 minutes ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

That's a lot of my problem with them, actually. I think that newer residents may get taken advantage of, because they don't realize they are being fleeced by the inflated prices. Of course I don't expect these sellers to have any moral issue with what they are doing, because they are indeed making money.

Now, if people who have lots of land experience choose to pay an inflated rate for a parcel because it's worth it to them for whatever reason, then whatever floats their boat, as long as they know they are paying too much. I don't care for the "rob the noobs" aspect that I suspect happens fairly frequently. 

I agree though some responsibility needs to lie with the noobs too.  When I first started I bought a house that cost 10k because of how it was marketed on the marketplace and all the good reviews. Little did I know that this house was a house from years ago because I was a noob and didn't know any better.  While it may have been super duper awesome at the time it isn't any longer.   This house is still on the MP with the same description and reviews. I learned my lesson to never buy anything on the MP I can't go see rezzed or demo.  Buyer beware.

I mean 49k lindens is about $200 RL money. At that point you would think it would be a good idea to do more research first.

[Caroline Takeda]

To me a Land Baron always was simply somebody who owns large anount of land for the purpose of making money with it.

Most of them rental firms.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 1/20/2022 at 4:06 PM, Feorie Frimon said:

We all know the term and it gets thrown around a lot. What does it actually mean? 
 

What are the conditions of one being a Land Baron? 

Whoever outbids you in a land auction.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/22/2022 at 2:49 AM, Caroline Takeda said:

To me a Land Baron always was simply somebody who owns large anount of land for the purpose of making money with it.

Most of them rental firms.

 

"INVESTMENT" OR GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD?

This video is actually a cautionary tale. Look at the date. And where are they now? they once claimed they made thousands of dollars a month "just sitting on their couch," and the husband quit his job in a bank. But where are they now? Nowhere. They eventually lost their land and now only one of them can be seen inworld, only going to clubs and not running a land business. Why? Because like many in this world, they imagined that if they kept buying sims they were "investing in the business." No, they were only piling up sunk costs. They did this because they thought they would endlessly keep having more customers. Then they didn't. Membership fell off, land buying fell off, and they are far from the only land barons whose successes were picked up by the media -- who never returned 10 years later to see what happened. They failed not only because they were in an artificial, virtual system where they didn't have all the information they needed, with land emission controlled by one source; they failed because they thought they could "get rich quick" which is seldom the case in RL.

Most of the land barons of yore are now gone from SL. There used to be some known for their decency and good practices, and now they are gone, either died in RL or out of the business, which is too hard and expensive.

It's odd to call island owners "landlords" and Mainland owners "land barons," when if anything it should be the reverse, as island owners have complete control over the island they buy and pay tier on, and Mainland owners do not have complete control and are sub-leasers of Estate Number One owned by Governor Linden. 

There are businesses mainly in islands who have 100 sims or more, and you never hear from them because they keep a low profile and don't post on the forums, which they believe is bad for business or unimportant for them. 

WHAT LEVEL IS LAND BARON - 50 SIMS?

What is the level at which one achieves baron status? At 25 sims? 50? I only have 14 myself, although they are spread out over many sims, in fact to address the challenge of the Mainland (so it is easier to get out of a sim when it turns south). I hardly consider myself a baron because I rent, and rarely sell land, and because I don't make a living out of SL -- I never quit that day job and neither should anyone else in this business, which is more like an elaborate hobby which pays some bills. There are some for whom it is a full-time business, where they have staff, web-based systems, etc. Some of the Blake Sea dealers of course do very well, but even they have to work hard for the money, it's a high customer contact business or a business managing staff intensively.

HATED - BUT EVERYONE KEEPS BUYING THEIR LAND

The hatred of land barons is an ideological one mainly growing out of the socialist worldview which is common on the forums, although in RL, people wouldn't want their ideal socialism to affect their own private properties. But it's also a position the average person comes to easily in SL when they see terrible practices inworld by land barons -- e.g. land cutting into tiny parcels which then are sold first for low prices then for high prices by ad farmers. Often an auction win or a bargain-basement parcel will be cut up with its best part set at higher prices and its worst parts at the back of a sim or in a middle of a sim will be chopped further and sold off quickly or even abandoned. I routinely see auction wins being cut up with part of them abandoned as they are too large a tract for people to manage, or the savvy barons know they are worthless and no one will buy them.

As has been explained many times, they can hold land and keep it at high prices endlessly because they price they will get will still cover their tier and still make a profit or they have such a high volume they can cover land that doesn't sell for awhile. And this is actually a public service, as a land baron may buy and hold a full sim, selling it off bit by bit over time, whereas the end user may only buy one parcel, then in time when he has more funds, buy another. The land baron is holding the view all that time.

NOT A FREE MARKET 

People think this state of affairs is the result of "capitalism" and "a free market," but it isn't because SL does not have a true free market and is an artificial, virtual world with lots of factors working against openness and transparency. This is because:

o The LindEx does not float free but has essentially a fixed exchange rate that in practice doesn't float beyond $240-242L to the US dollar.

o Rules against land-cutting are not enforced.

o The auction winners are not publicized, so we can't see those with a practice of bidding up every auction, then backing out and letting end users pay higher prices -- this would be less possible to do in RL. There is no "deed office" where you can see the history of buys and sells and abandons -- if you could see that, it would serve as a social curb on land barons who even buy on an auction and then dump it the next day merely to keep prices high and their tier lower. The Lindens can't reasonably regulate such behaviour, but you would know not to buy from those who do this, and eventually if they wanted customers they would have to stop.

o We have no idea who won the auctions and for how much unless we fly around literally inworld; "past auction" pages are not kept for more than a week and if you look at the Wayback Machine, you will discover that shockingly, there are no "saves" of that page for more than 10 years. It's interesting to go back to see the auctions of 2006 and 2007 when the Lindens auctioned off entire Mainland sims which went for as high as $4500. Today, if you visit those once priceless Blake or other coveted waterfront sims, you will even find half of them abandoned, and some of them with brand new owners who got it from the auction *again* as it was abandoned and then re-sold by the Lindens.

PAST APPRECIATION

When land prices were higher and the economy was better, people appreciated land barons more because they bought land that was liquidated, making it worth selling rather than abandoning. Today, with no bots allowed, and with prices having dropped to 0.2/m  or less, land barons won't bother. There used to be a category of scavengers who went around looking for underpriced land and re-selling it. This was a service for newbies especially as they cleaned up the mess of postage stamp sheet sims the Lindens had made consisting entirely of 512s that mainly went to seed; they could grab land, hold it, and re-sell it for a reasonable price and still make it worth their while. Those people are all almost all gone now. Reclamation land services are a good thing, and not "bottom-feeding" -- they generally make land better than it was, and more attractive and in smaller amounts for other people.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Today you see a few land barons racing each other to the bottom, making sure they stay on top of the "land for sale" list with the cheapest parcels. This seems not to matter to anyone but them. They will swap land among themselves until it is dumped, along the way using "holdbacks" -- putting a lot of land for sale for cheap, then a key parcel in the view is taken off sale, only to be put back to sale with a price jacked up beyond its worth to force someone to "buy the view". Or they will put "donuts" or underwater 16m coastal parcels so again, they can extort sales from those who want to keep their view. 

Even so, the existence of land barons keeps land from devaluing totally. People think they want land all to be uniformly low-priced -- until they want to sell their own, especially if they developed it nicely and put buildings and decor for sale on it.

People imagine gatchas were not tied to the rest of the economy but of course they were -- people resold gatchas to pay for their SL expenses, including land purchases and rents. Not everyone can afford, or wants, a premium account with Bellisseria.

ABANDONED LAND NOW GLUTTING THE MARKET

The Lindens have exacerbated this already terrible problem by deciding to dump on to the auction huge amounts of abandoned land that they used to leave fallow for years. They make large, unwieldy bundles of all the abandoned land on a sim without regard to its tier level, sometimes going over just a few meters of a standard tier level -- in a system where few people want to go beyond to the next level because it means paying much more and now for land they aren't even using. The auction cuts also ensure conflicts as some people's land gets blocked if a new neighbour puts on no-access or security orbs and makes life unpleasant. But understandably, the Lindens have likely been mandated by their new owners to get all that excess merchandise off the shelves and under tier.

We now see sim after sim with previously abandoned land either newly abandoned, or cut up into small pieces to "help it sell". Why don't the Lindens make it look better, put it in reasonably sized pieces, and sell it directly inworld as they used to do with 512 m "first land"? I suppose it's because with this current system, they get to sell the same land over and over again.

There was a time some 15 years ago when there was only 10% abandoned land on the Mainland, but then more continents were added, and hastily, without roads or rivers at all, just granite squares often, and these then made the abandoned land swell to 20% or higher.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

1. If the Lindens are going into a sim to first clear it in abandoned status, and second to set it up for auction, they could also have a road crew put in roads or parks or best of all, bodies of water that are Linden protected, and make the sims habitable and attractive, so that they don't keep getting bought and abandoned over and over. This is not the US $10,000 Mole job that Abnor invoked to connect the continents; this is less than a morning's work. The Lindens lavish attention on Bellisseria and ignore the Mainland, perhaps because they intend to delete it. That's unreasonable and cruel and harms their business; they could make it useable again with a minimum of effort.

2. The old Linden homes should be moved on to the abandoned Mainland sims, either on full sims that are empty, or in parts of them abandoned, which again, will make them more attractive.

3. The Lindens need to take a leaf from their own land baron customers who failed, and stop printing land so speedily in Bellisseria, where they are only churning and selling to their same customers, emptying out sims behind them; soon enough they will meet the fate of the original Linden homes.

4. The Lindens could raise the premium bonus for group land from 10% to 15% which will encourage people to absorb abandoned land and manage it.

5. The Lindens need to outlaw the use of Star Wars type giant obelisks and the "Good Neighbour" obelisk which are only placed on microparcels to drive people off their land, create abandoned land, and then enable others to take it -- or merely to despoil the view with ads. It doesn't matter if "Good Neighbour" contains what some view as valuable and needed advice; when the obelisk is placed on microparcels ruining the view for others, and even encroaching on Linden roads, they don't serve their intended purpose.

6. The Lindens ruled some years ago that search/places ads cannot be placed on parcels less than 96 m in size; they did this to stop malls and other venues from trying to raise their view in search with multiple mico-plot search ads. They could apply this same logic to sales, and make it impossible to set a 96 m or 128 m parcel to sale. That will end roadside or other positional extortionist sales.

7. The Lindens love to compete with their own customers, sometimes with disastrous results. Why don't they compete with them in the ad space, where they could do some good? The Moles should create a networked system of road signs, kiosks, and billboards that would be tastefully done, accessible to all for limited durations of time, and PG in content (like the old Telehub ad system). Best of all, these ads would not be on parcels set to sale for extortionist prices. One could debate whether they should outlaw all other roadside signs except their own, but they won't have to; business will flock to a system that is tasteful, predictable, doesn't defile the view, and is open to more people. One of SL's biggest problems is a lack of advertising capacity of the right kind, and a proliferation of ugly advertising people screen out of view, literally or figuratively.

 

 

 

Edited January 24, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/21/2022 at 11:38 AM, Soull Starlight said:

I agree with Sylvia. I think the 'barons' are those who buy up land without concern of the surrounding land/community, with the sole intention of reselling at the highest profit they can muster.

Far more nefarious than landowners, who might have the same amount of land holdings as a baron but works with/in communities to create and share. 

And yet people keep buying the land barons' land, so what can you do. And often, on the way to creating a community such as you value, a land dealer still has to buy from a baron as the Lindens no longer auction *new* sims with roads and rivers, but only occasionally *old* full sims usually with no Linden protected land on them at all.

[Hopalong Kerensky]

Any person who has priced land higher than you want to pay for it?

[kevin Jerrold]

I'm a land person but dont like to hold onto land for a long time. I buy land at a reasonable price then try to sell it for a couple of hundred linden more. Example. I've recently bought land for 4100L I've split it into 6 square plots. 4x1536sqm and 2x1024sqm the 2 1024sqm I'm selling at 600L each and the 4 1536sqm I'm selling for 900L.

 

I'm not looking to make a huge profit like the usual land barons but as long as I make someone happy by selling them a more affordable mainland plot and make a few linden profit. Everyones a winner.

[Setsuki Takeda]

For me it's not just the ridiculous prices, but also the fact that they don't *do* anything with the land.

Go walk around Bay City, think "Oh, this could be a very nice place to move." and peek at sales, find out that every parcel *starts* at 300k L$ and has nothing on it but a little yellow fullbright box.

If they put something up, built something there that fit with the area, I wouldn't want to hunt them down and beat them with a shoe quite as badly as I do.

The fact that most prime regions are nothing more than rental and sale boxes with nobody using them while some ******* tries to get literally thousands of dollars real money for a virtual parcel is like the opposite of gentrification.

Some places buy them up and raise them, but not the insane levels that you see around Blake Sea or in Bay City, and they put up a nice house and add some landscaping to it so it *looks* like a place actually for sale even though nothing on the parcel is included. The one I was considering actually picking up was ten times the going rate around it, but was a nice roadside parcel with clean flat edges, and they had put a cabin up on it with trees and a little driveway with a truck rezzed in it. The price gouging made me less than thrilled, but the fact that it wasn't an empty eyesore in the neighborhood *almost* made up for it.

[kevin Jerrold]

I love owning land and being able to sell it at a reasonable price. Just making a couple of hundred in profit. When I buy it I tend to use it and build stuff try make it look nice while I have it