Land Flippers Hate or Love?

[StarlanderGoods]

Just now, Sid Nagy said:

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.

YES! I think we are about to agree!  It´s what the system allows, and it has become unhealthy, so changing the system to prevent practices that harm it in the long run should be a good thing.

[Arielle Popstar]

The way I have understood it for some time is that S/L is in a large part financed by AFK parcel and landowners who make the regular payments on their land through a credit card subscription but never actually log in world anymore. Rocking that boat could cost them lost money.

[Sid Nagy]

@StarlanderGoodsMileages and opinions vary.
I have a different opinion and I just put it up for discussion.
That I have another opinion than most is not really an argument pro or contra.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

They simply make use of what the system allowes.

Yes.

And the system sucks, and is in fact counterproductive to the development of communities and a viable culture on the mainland. Which is precisely why it needs to be changed.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The way I have understood it for some time is that S/L is in a large part financed by AFK parcel and landowners who make the regular payments on their land through a credit card subscription but never actually log in world anymore. Rocking that boat could cost them lost money.

Possibly true to some degree, but such people are of course not flipping land. What needs to be addressed is the issue of land speculation and monopolistic practices.

[Arielle Popstar]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Possibly true to some degree, but such people are of course not flipping land. What needs to be addressed is the issue of land speculation and monopolistic practices.

Well some of those might be the ones that have it up for sale long term without caring if it actually sells. Maybe some sort of tax writeoff.

[Marigold Devin]

I guess I'm going to be spending a bit more time having a scour round the mainland for the land flippers, as I thought the hardcore activity had stopped once Zindra adult continent was created. Or are they doing it there more now? I make no apologies for being out of touch with this, but am amazed at such passionate responses by certain people. 

One time I recall one of the major land owners attempting to exhort a huge amount of money out of one landowner who lived near to me on Peraut sim. He had a store and could have used this extra 32m parcel, but it was set at a ridiculously high price per sq m, and then the land owner put an ugly sign on it that blocked part of the frontage of my neighbour's store. I got together with some other members of a group I'm in and we ARd the heck out of it, and that particular land owner was forced by Linden Lab to part with the land which was given to the store owner. I don't know the full ins and outs of what happened behind the scenes at Linden Lab, but it was a good outcome for my neighbour. 

My bug bear was always the ugly signs on micro parcels, but I never could understand why people would choose to pay such exhorbitant prices to acquire ANY land in a virtual world. I don't even think back in the day we could derender (or could we always derender ugly stuff, and I am just a massive dolls head?).  

I certainly don't waste time hating anyone. Not even those land owners who use the bots that pounce and acquire land that someone has tried to sell to one specific person for a peppercorn amount but forgot to set the land to someone specific and poof it's gone to the bot. Some of those land owners were decent enough to hand the land back, some were not.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour 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.

 

This misses the point SId, SL mainland isn't about the land, the land is a background character to the community that forms upon it.

If it's not facilitating the formation of community, then it's not serving it's only purpose.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Coffee Pancake

[Setsuki Takeda]

4 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.

 

When I had a large area it was built out as a nice little village, complete with a town square, the shops (that weren't RP areas like my pub, bistro, clinic, classroom, photo studio, or grocery store were rentable and there were rowhouses that could be rented. It all looked quite lovely, in a mid-century industrial theme to compliment the gym (multi-level thing with power-lifting areas and a cardio gym with scripted showers and toilets for "needs" meters and it even had a pool with nice loungers around it and a small "day spa" with a sauna and small "beach bar" set up, the only thing remotely ugly was the gas station (which was a GTFO Hub) that had a helipad built in to the roof and storage units under the stairs up. Even there I had temp-attach bento animated food dispensers set up so people could stop in for a snack while they filled up their vehicles with four different fuel systems and a vehicle rezzer in the garage that let people use public access GTFO enabled vehicles for their runs set with a custom timer script that would delete them 15 mins after standing so guests could get out and do things when they got where they were going without having the truck disappear as soon as they stood up.

 

I see similar things in some RP cities around the grid, all with rentals for people who are *not* premium to be able to join the community, and while I wouldn't mind seeing giant towers of square boxes floating just off the ground disappear it would be a real shame for places like those to poof.

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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.

This is why, when I abandoned the massive portion of my region I owned, I kept the roadside parcel for my home. The last thing I needed was to see the lovely little town I had built replaced by a glowing fulbright yellow box like every other accessible plot along the road I'm on.

[Sid Nagy]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

 

This misses the point SId, SL mainland isn't about the land, the land is a background character to the community that forms upon it.

If it's not facilitating the formation of community, then it's not serving it's only purpose.

Aren't you idealizing a bit now?
Most mainland is for at least 90% a desolate landscape with lots of abandoned and empty land and here and there a some nice spots mixed with eyesore builds. Not really with much community sense.
Something one can typically expect when there are no building regulations.
There are a few better sims, but they are a vast minority.
Mainland is mostly like private land IMHO a lot of patches with mostly each on his own to make the best out of their plot. Only private land has more see views.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Paul Hexem]

Linden Lab is doing something very, very wrong.

Sitting on dozens or hundreds of "for sale" parcels for months or years at grossly inflated prices should not be a viable business model.

Maybe an exponentially increasing, recurring fee as long as a parcel is on sale, that carries between owners.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Paul Hexem

[animats]

10 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Sitting on dozens or hundreds of "for sale" parcels for months or years at grossly inflated prices should not be a viable business model.

That's the basic problem. That this is a viable business model indicates a flaw in LL's pricing model.

Here's a thought: mainland tier discounts should be local only. That is, you get the tier discount for owning more land only if it's in the same region. So you get a discount if you buy lots of land in one place to build something large, but owning lots in many places does not pay. This breaks the business model of land flippers.

Edited March 7, 2022 by animats

[StarlanderGoods]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

Aren't you idealizing a bit now?
Most mainland is either a desolate landscape with abandoned land and here and there a some nice spots mixed with eyesore builds. Not really with much community sense.
Something one can typically expect when there are no building regulations.
There are a few better sims, but they are a vast minority.
Mainland is mostly like private land IMHO a lot of patches with mostly each on his own to make the best out of their plot. Only private land has more see views.

I frequently travel through the mainland, and while there are wastelands, and some terrible-perpetually-unfinished builds, there are plenty of little towns where people bunch up around a shared idea or identity, like little towns on the side of the road.  They are everywhere, and they are distinct.  Not to mention all the communities in mainland that are not centralized, like the sailing clubs, with all their ports, or the GTFO community, or the farm RP people, with their farms and barns and food markets.

Of course a group of people are not going to make something as cohesive as a private sim that is built 100% around being photogenic, but I enjoy the natural communities of mainland more.

[Sid Nagy]

I seem to miss the mainland gene.
I only see ugliness and emptiness with here and there a pearl when I travel mainland.
Yes, it has improved since 2007 over the years but I'm not impressed about it.

Bellisseria was a nice effort, but that starts to become boring too with sim after sim the same 5 or 6 houses that are available. And tons of them with not a soul in sight ever.

 

[Paul Hexem]

30 minutes ago, animats said:

That's the basic problem. That this is a viable business model indicates a flaw in LL's pricing model.

Here's a thought: mainland tier discounts should be local only. That is, you get the tier discount for owning more land only if it's in the same region. So you get a discount if you buy lots of land in one place to build something large, but owning lots in many places does not pay. This breaks the business model of land flippers.

Or a 10% increase to your tier cost for each non adjacent parcel you own.

My concern is that they'll just make alts- which is why I thought it'd be better to tie the expenses to the parcel/region itself. Reset the fee once a year, maybe. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

8 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

I seem to miss the mainland gene.
I only see ugliness and emptiness with here and there a pearl when I travel mainland.
Yes, it has improved since 2007 over the years but I'm not impressed about it.

Bellisseria was a nice effort, but that starts to become boring too with sim after sim the same 5 or 6 houses that are available. And tons of them with not a soul in sight ever.

 

Like @StarlanderGoods, I know of a number of really robust, dynamic, and also quite beautiful mainland communities. Most of these, I might add, depend upon rentals to help support tier -- I doubt that they'd be possible on the scale at which they currently exist, were it necessary to relocate them to estates.

At the same time, you're quite right that a great deal of mainland is an eyesore -- that's part of the problem that a restriction on land flipping is designed to solve, or at least mitigate.

I should also say that one of my favourite leisure time activities is walking(!) the routes of the SLRR, or scootering the mainland highways. Not so much because I'm a "vehicle" person (I'm an awful driver!), but because it's astonishing the hidden gems one can find on the mainland. I actually don't think it's as bad as some would have you believe.

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

I only see ugliness and emptiness with here and there a pearl when I travel mainland.
Yes, it has improved since 2007 over the years but I'm not impressed about it.

So you think it's ugly, but you oppose cracking down on one of the things that makes it so?

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I should also say that one of my favourite leisure time activities is walking(!) the routes of the SLRR, or scootering the mainland highways. Not so much because I'm a "vehicle" person (I'm an awful driver!), but because it's astonishing the hidden gems one can find on the mainland. I actually don't think it's as bad as some would have you believe.

Speaking as someone that drives the Linden roads and waterways often, I've been known to crash because I got caught up in looking at sone of the builds you can find along those travel routes.

Some of it is really, really good.

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, animats said:

So you get a discount if you buy lots of land in one place to build something large

That doesn't solve the problem of ugly builds. Some of the ugliest I've seen have been large.

[Arielle Popstar]

24 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

That doesn't solve the problem of ugly builds. Some of the ugliest I've seen have been large.

How about a peer review system where a fail will result in a premium price for the eyesore?

[Setsuki Takeda]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

So you think it's ugly, but you oppose cracking down on one of the things that makes it so?

Speaking as someone that drives the Linden roads and waterways often, I've been known to crash because I got caught up in looking at sone of the builds you can find along those travel routes.

Some of it is really, really good.

You'll often find me pulled to the side of the road in the middle of a GTFO run camming around a particularly nice build and possibly taking a LM to come back to it when I can get out of my vehicle without risking resetting the delivery I'm on.

 

Honestly, despite having some "traffic generating" things on my land, while it was still there *most* of the people who actually explored and interacted with people and facilities rezzed out came in from the Linden Road not via a TP from a "system" that was supported on my land. Heck, most of the GTFO people didn't even enter the driveway, they just stopped in the middle of the road and hit the deliver/load button before moving on. Really only had one who stayed, but he was very interested in my oil refinery that was producing actual limited amounts of GFS fuel to fill your tanks with at my gas station.

[Persephone Emerald]

7 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

Aren't you idealizing a bit now?
Most mainland is for at least 90% a desolate landscape with lots of abandoned and empty land and here and there a some nice spots mixed with eyesore builds. Not really with much community sense.
Something one can typically expect when there are no building regulations.
There are a few better sims, but they are a vast minority.
Mainland is mostly like private land IMHO a lot of patches with mostly each on his own to make the best out of their plot. Only private land has more see views.

Sid, I invite you to come explore the continent of Heterocera. Most of the cooler stuff is on the outer ring of this atoll island, but my woods are facing the inner lake. There is SL history of this land mass having been discovered with ruins of an abandoned civilization, including an ancient temple to a Moth goddess that still exists. (Heterocera is a family of moths.) I've thus incorporated some ruins, butterflies and a giver for old-style butterfly wings into my woodlands. (As a side note, Heterocera is also home to the longest mountain range in SL.)

As for land-flippers, one way to lessen their activities is to contact one's neighbors to ask if they might be interested in property one wishes to dispose of, rather than putting these usually smaller parcels up for sale to just anyone. I did this recently, and ended up with 2 pleasant interactions and one new friendship. The neighbor I talked with today exchanged group invites with me, so we can both move through and rez on each other's land. (Mine is always open to people, so not only can they re-rez a crashed vehicle, they can also rez props for photos or a picnic. There's a 5 minute autoreturn to avoid trash piling up. 

I agree that mainland is not for everyone, but I love the quirky mix of personal visions for this virtual world. I love the GTFO gas stations and old monuments just as much as the pretty mesh houses and amusement parks. 

Edited March 8, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Jennifer Boyle]

12 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

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.

People have to pay LL for L$ with real money. If LL sells me L$ for USD, and I pay LL with the L$, LL still gets the USD, so it makes little or no difference to them.

9 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Linden Lab is doing something very, very wrong.

Sitting on dozens or hundreds of "for sale" parcels for months or years at grossly inflated prices should not be a viable business model.

Maybe an exponentially increasing, recurring fee as long as a parcel is on sale, that carries between owners.

I know of large vacant parcels in Zindra that have been for sale by dealers for years. They have had to spend thousands of dollars to maintain them. I have wondered how they can afford to hold vacant land for so long. I doubt it will ever sell for enough for them to break even.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Jennifer Boyle

[Scylla Rhiadra]

19 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Sid, I invite you to come explore the continent of Heterocera.

I love Heterocera! One of my "homes" is there, and it's one of my favourite places to explore!

Is your parcel there listed in your picks?

[Persephone Emerald]

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I love Heterocera! One of my "homes" is there, and it's one of my favourite places to explore!

Is your parcel there listed in your picks?

I didn't have a good link in my Picks, but I just added one to "I'm not here" and "Lucid Dreams Travel Agency".  The travel agency is not currently active, but was an idea I had to help people find places in SL to explore or for Roleplay. One problem is that by the time I make up a good notecard of LMs in some theme or other, many of the places have already changed.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

I seem to miss the mainland gene.
I only see ugliness and emptiness with here and there a pearl when I travel mainland.
Yes, it has improved since 2007 over the years but I'm not impressed about it.

Bellisseria was a nice effort, but that starts to become boring too with sim after sim the same 5 or 6 houses that are available. And tons of them with not a soul in sight ever.

 

 

The ugly empty mainland is land speculators, they put crap out and then walk away, because the land looks more valuable if there is stuff nearby.

Bellisseria gave us a taste of what mainland could be without rentals and landlords. Private personal ownership or nothing. It's not perfect and not the thriving hub it could be, but its a huge step in the right direction and shows that with little change a lot can be accomplished.

Make mainland the up market Bellisseria. Plots big enough to require tier or group pools (much bigger than belli). Quality fixed infrastructure.