Land Flippers Hate or Love?

[HalfMoonDesigns]

i hate them with a passion i know they keep the sl lights on but still, i wanted to make costly mainland cheaper for those with less cash so we can all enjoy sl but i see this is not possible, i was deceived and lied to in Order to buy the land and yep resale it. has one ever lied to get land from you and resale it?                                                                                                                                                         p.s grammar is not perfect go ahead and muck it wont bother me at all

[Persephone Emerald]

I think it would depend on the person. Don't give up land that you like and want to keep. If you want to get rid of land, then having someone willing to pay for it is great. If you don't like your neighbor, then move or wait until they move. In my experience, people with the biggest, ugliest builds don't stay long. 

It is possible to get cheap mainland the same way the land-flippers do it. If you're Premium, you can ask to buy abandoned land by filing a support ticket.

[Setsuki Takeda]

I don't mind the ones that sell for reasonable amounts, and decorate the parcels nicely so they enhance the areas, but if I see one more glowing fullbright yellow box pop up along the Linden Roads linking back to that same "Property Rentals" place I'm going to find a way to nuke them from orbit.

Bad enough the same barren lots are all over hot spots like Bay City asking *at least* 300k L$ for a 1024, but they're along every major road taking any and every spot with drivable access and marking them up to 3-5x the price of all surrounding parcels without so much as dropping an empty house on it to make the thing look at least passably inhabited.

[Sid Nagy]

They are all take it or leave it deals.
I don't really see the problem to be honest.
If you don't want to sell for  the prices that land flippers pay, just abandon you land and get nothing at all.
If you don't want to pay the price for a plot that is for sale, just don't buy it. Go to private land. There you only pay tier.

[Setsuki Takeda]

26 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

They are all take it or leave it deals.
I don't really see the problem to be honest.
If you don't want to sell for  the prices that land flippers pay, just abandon you land and get nothing at all.
If you don't want to pay the price for a plot that is for sale, just don't buy it. Go to private land. There you only pay tier.

Kinda, until they buy up every slot in a "RP" region, like the Bay City example. Most parcels for sale there are owned by the same place, even if they only sell two or three a year asking $1000 (that's dollars, not Lindens) for them while paying $100 in tier to maintain them is probably working out fine for them...

People need to stop buying from them, no matter the price or location, let the massive land holdings become a liability so *they* start abandoning it and maybe give up and leave and people can buy and sell parcels in popular areas between people who will actually *use* them and contribute to the region rather than degrade it with ugly empty glowing advertisements for their money-making schemes.

[Sid Nagy]

It is not necessary to live in Bay City to enjoy SL. It is just a few sims on a server, just like the rest of SL.
I always found Bay City ridiculous expensive, so I don't live there. Let them charge whatever they want. As long as it isn't my money, I'll be just fine.

Same goes for  RL.  I'm content with more affordable brands and places, so I don't own a Maserati, a Rolex or an Amsterdam downtown penthouse, but a Renault, a HEMA watch and a small apartment on the outskirts of my hometown a few hundred kilometers away from Amsterdam.  I'm still content with what I achieved in my life for most part.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Jennifer Boyle]

I wish the ones in my vicinity would lower their prices enough to actually flip instead of holding land vacant and for sale for years. 

[Sid Nagy]

I think people with a lifetime membership from the early days are for a fair bit responsible for this.
They can ask whatever they want for their land. They don't pay tier for it. So they can hang on to it until the end of SL if nobody comes around to pay big time.

[Jennifer Boyle]

 

5 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

I think people with a lifetime membership from the early days are for a fair bit responsible for this.
They can ask whatever they want for their land. They don't pay tier for it. So they can hang on to it until the end of SL if nobody comes around to pay big time.

How many of them are there, or can there be?

What are their TOS? How much land can they own for free? How old do they have to be?

[Sid Nagy]

In the first year or so of SL people could buy lifetime memberships. They needed the cash for further development I guess.
It is impossible to buy a lifetime membership at the moment. My guess the lifetime accoounts are from before the SL hype in 2006\2007.

There has been a trick (in the past) too, to hold land and not pay a dime in tier for it.
I don't remember how it exactly worked and I don't know if LL has done something to make that trick useless nowadays. It is not my beer.
It was discussed years ago in a thread on the old (no longer existing) SLuniverse site.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Marigold Devin]

4 hours ago, HalfMoonDesigns said:

i hate them with a passion i know they keep the sl lights on but still, i wanted to make costly mainland cheaper for those with less cash so we can all enjoy sl but i see this is not possible, i was deceived and lied to in Order to buy the land and yep resale it. has one ever lied to get land from you and resale it?                                                                                                                                                         p.s grammar is not perfect go ahead and muck it wont bother me at all

I didn't know land flippers were so hated, and I was one for a while, but I didn't just buy land to resell at a higher price. I'd buy odd parcels of mainland, negotiate with other land owners and even Linden Lab, join as much back together as I could, put transferable houses and plants and fences on some to make them ready-made parcels, and sell them at whatever I thought they were fairly worth. There were just some parcels near oceans and roads that I priced up higher, but often I'd given a couple of thousand L$ back when purchased. If you wilfully diddle someone then karma only comes for you at a later date. 

[Conifer Dada]

I joined SL in 2006 and became a premium member a few months later. There was a shortage of land then and if you bought what seemed at the time a reasonably priced plot of land, you were almost guaranteed to be able to sell it for more a few days later. So I did flip a few pieces of land at that time. But it was not a business, I wasn't doing it to make lots of money. I was doing it work my way up to buying my first 512m plot, having started by buying 16m plots on ad farms and joining them to make bigger plots. 

The land market was dominated then by big land barons. My conspiracy theory is that several of these land barons were alts of the same RL person, who also used lots of other alts as fake 'customers' to 'buy' their own land, thus creating a fake land market that drew in genuine buyers.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Conifer Dada

[HalfMoonDesigns]

ok this has got off topic here i never meant that i hated land flippers in that way hey if you can make a fast buck go for it, what i meant was being lied to bye one i had set out to buy mainland parcels that had high prices like sailing plots you can never find them, and then sell them at much lower prices to those with less cash i put one up for sale even said no land flippers, so what happens one comes with hidden groups acts like they really wanted the place etc and then bam resold it for a higher price the very thing i did not want to happen.

[Krystina Ferraris]

32 minutes ago, HalfMoonDesigns said:

ok this has got off topic here i never meant that i hated land flippers in that way hey if you can make a fast buck go for it, what i meant was being lied to bye one i had set out to buy mainland parcels that had high prices like sailing plots you can never find them, and then sell them at much lower prices to those with less cash i put one up for sale even said no land flippers, so what happens one comes with hidden groups acts like they really wanted the place etc and then bam resold it for a higher price the very thing i did not want to happen.

It’s unethical indeed but it’s impossible to stop land speculators, rl and SL

[Coffee Pancake]

Land flippers and speculators are a parasitic plague.

They add nothing of value to SL, it's residents or culture.

But they do create an unnecessarily barrier to entry by inflating the cost of participation for those who do.

Their actions are not regulated by the "free market", act as a brake to growth and activities in world at a time this platform can least afford it.

 

This is an issue that desperately needs a policy shift from @Linden Lab @Patch Linden, a good start would be prohibiting rental of mainland and offering a transition deal to allow landlords to consolidate their holdings and migrate to private estates. Caps on the amount of mainland a single 'real person' can own and throttles for transfers of ownership.

 

[Quistess Alpha]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

prohibiting rental of mainland

just my 2 L$, but the availability of small parcels for all residents, for pennies a week is a real service. If LL disallowed mainland renting, I'd love to see direct tier (pay for what you use) payable in linden dollars.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 hours ago, Marigold Devin said:

I didn't know land flippers were so hated, and I was one for a while, but I didn't just buy land to resell at a higher price. I'd buy odd parcels of mainland, negotiate with other land owners and even Linden Lab, join as much back together as I could, put transferable houses and plants and fences on some to make them ready-made parcels, and sell them at whatever I thought they were fairly worth. There were just some parcels near oceans and roads that I priced up higher, but often I'd given a couple of thousand L$ back when purchased. If you wilfully diddle someone then karma only comes for you at a later date. 

This isn't really "flipping," in the sense that I think most people here mean, Marigold.

The point is that you were adding value to the land before your re-sold it. Land speculators do not do this. In fact, on the contrary, they sometimes use property holdings to devalue nearby land so as to encourage owners to sell up at a reduced rates.

I don't think that the legitimate sale of land, particularly in smallish parcels, is the problem here. It's people who do literally nothing but buy and sell land to make quick profits that are the problem.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Land flippers and speculators are a parasitic plague.

They add nothing of value to SL, it's residents or culture.

But they do create an unnecessarily barrier to entry by inflating the cost of participation for those who do.

Their actions are not regulated by the "free market", act as a brake to growth and activities in world at a time this platform can least afford it.

 

This is an issue that desperately needs a policy shift from @Linden Lab @Patch Linden, a good start would be prohibiting rental of mainland and offering a transition deal to allow landlords to consolidate their holdings and migrate to private estates. Caps on the amount of mainland a single 'real person' can own and throttles for transfers of ownership.

 

The first part of your post I wholeheartedly endorse -- and possibly parts of the second.

Prohibiting rentals on mainland would, however, literally kill it. That would certainly get rid of the land flipping problem, as most mainland would become essentially valueless, but what that in turn would mean is that the only options for renting or owning land would be on private estates, which would effectively make land ownership prohibitively expensive for many, as well as probably inflating rental rate on estates.

[StarlanderGoods]

Easiest question ever, I definitely hate them.

And I will second @Coffee Pancake´s motion for anti-monopoly regulation.

[Sid Nagy]

1 hour ago, Quistess Alpha said:

just my 2 L$, but the availability of small parcels for all residents, for pennies a week is a real service. If LL disallowed mainland renting, I'd love to see direct tier (pay for what you use) payable in linden dollars.

Payments in L$ to LL will never happen.
LL has the money printer at their office. So collecting L$ has no real value for them.
The L$ they get on the marketplace are only there as a L$ sink to keep demand up so that they make their commissions on the L$ market.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Sid Nagy]

To be honest I don't see the problem.
If one finds a patch of land to expensive, just search for another one that is cheaper.
If their land flipping game is no longer profitable, the flippers will lower their prices or end their business.

Edit to add: LL could help a bit by parceling a few empty sims and put them for sale for a price flippers don't pay but consumers like.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Istelathis]

I don't know any, although I have had brief conversations with some when I entered their properties for sale 🙃  A lot of them are quick to initiate a conversation when you step foot on their property, so I imagine they take their business very seriously.  They were usually pleasant and did not push the sale too hard.  I've wondered if they are earning very much, or if this is more of a hobby that they try to break even with.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Istelathis

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

To be honest I don't see the problem.
If one finds a patch of land to expensive, just search for another one that is cheaper.
If their land flipping game is no longer profitable, they will lower their prices or step out of business.

It's a problem because it is strangling development on the mainland, making it more expensive, and more difficult to consolidate parcels into something large enough to be worth developing. Land flippers are also deliberately buying small parcels that block future development, and using them as well to make the land around them less valuable so that it will be abandoned.

It's not, in other words, about individual renters or buyers, but rather about the larger malaise that grips the mainland outside of Belli.

Those who do nothing but flip land are pernicious scum who contribute nothing of value to SL's culture or economy. They are neoliberalism at its most gross. I'd love to see them eradicated.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Sid Nagy]

They simply make use of what the system allowes.
One tries to rent out private land, another sings every weekend in a bar and a third one tries to make a dollar with land flipping.
It is one of the few jobs available in SL.

[StarlanderGoods]

3 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

To be honest I don't see the problem.

This is okay, but it doesnt mean that a problem doesnt exists, it only means that it hasnt affected you personally, or if it did, you havent noticed it yet.

Of course Scylla would make a better post about it while I was typing