Land Flippers Hate or Love?

[Sid Nagy]

39 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

instead seeing them as providing revenue to Linden Lab for as long as they keep their money losing shenanigans up.

Either they are a LL invention or these particular flippers know a trick to avoid paying tier.
I don't believe the "they are complete fools" theory.
We are not talking about losing ten dollar and some change a month here.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Solar Legion]

Or - and I know this is hard to grasp - they don't care.

Until it can be proven otherwise, they're paying the Tier. Beyond that, it is all supposition.

Entertain yourself with it but do try not to believe it too hard.

[Sid Nagy]

I have nothing to prove.
My theory is as valid as your believe that there are some rich people who don't care.
Rich people became rich because they take money very very seriously.

[Istelathis]

In SL we have a variety of people who enjoy investing in different things.  Some like fire departments, some like trains, some like nature trails, the list goes on and on.  I thought that some of these people might just really enjoy real-estate and for them the investment is just part of their second life.  I would think it is an expensive hobby, but I haven't a clue how much they make or lose.

[Solar Legion]

My "theory" does not require much proof beyond what we can observe/what is: The flippers exist, they pay Tier.

It must be proven that they are avoiding paying such.

Point blank here: You assume they must either be foolish or somehow avoiding paying. Both are assumptions with one being of their character or intelligence and the other requiring actual proof the likes of which we Users do not have access to gain.

Enjoy your thought experiment.

[Sid Nagy]

How do you know they pay tier?
The system has been gamed before.
We talk about too much money to do it just for the fun.

But whatever, I'm totally not interested in mainland, so I call it a day.
It will just end in an "yes it is - no it isn't fight". We both don't know for sure what is happening.

Edit to add: As you can see, I know how to laugh at your posts too.
If that is your preferred discussion method, I will play along from now on.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Solar Legion]

That's nice. 

There's no "discussion" to be had on the matter.

[Coffee Pancake]

No one is paying LL full tier prices to sit on huge stretches of mainland for years on end, plenty of which isn't even listed as being for sale, and just eating the cost.

NO ONE. That's not how your own money works, that's not how anyone else's money works.

 

right on que .. and hopelessly out of touch

 

 

[Istelathis]

18 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

No one is paying LL full tier prices to sit on huge stretches of mainland for years on end, plenty of which isn't even listed as being for sale, and just eating the cost.

Oh gawds, imagine if someone passed away years ago and has been charged a monthly fee since then.  Or perhaps some business had a plan to invest in SL, the project was put on a back burner, and the accountant has not questioned the monthly expense.  
 

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Solar Legion said:

Or maybe I just don't care if flippers make any money to cover their Tier and am instead seeing them as providing revenue to Linden Lab for as long as they keep their money losing shenanigans up.

You may be right. The thing is, why would they intentionally set out to lose so much money? Just because they like LL so much?

Or is it more likely that they've got something going on and LL isn't making the kind of money that should be coming from this behavior?

2 hours ago, Istelathis said:

Oh gawds, imagine if someone passed away years ago and has been charged a monthly fee since then.  Or perhaps some business had a plan to invest in SL, the project was put on a back burner, and the accountant has not questioned the monthly expense.  

That could certainly be the case for some parcels, but not these flippers that are actively buying up more land.

[animats]

 

6 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

It's almost all one guy, isn't it? Last time I looked, it was.

Less so than it used to be. Now I see more small scale land barons offering inland property he used to own. The big Zindra land baron seems to be refocusing on high-value properties on the coast.

[Mollymews]

2 hours ago, animats said:

Less so than it used to be. Now I see more small scale land barons offering inland property he used to own. The big Zindra land baron seems to be refocusing on high-value properties on the coast.

on the first

i have noticed this as well, more perople getting into being small scale land barons. Two reasons I think. 1) newish people buying into the Metaverse asset hype. 2) people coming to Belli from the rental estates and beginning to take mainland parcels as well (due to their now being Premium) something they have never done before

on the second

that big baron has properties all over the grid, even on Sharp (G) continent

a speculation

how could someone own so much mainland and be able to afford the tier.  It could be a too-big-to-fail situation from which the person could obtain Atlas-like status thru group tier under-payment.  A thing is that  tier is easily contributed. Top up a group to buy land, reduce the tier contribution after the land is bought

this tho brings our under-tiered group to the attention of Land Linden. A thing is that the group land reclamation process is not automated. It is a manual process. Therefore, don't reclaim these groups' parcels unless signed off by Boss Linden

this is most likely all wrong, but when speculating about how paying less tier for mainland than expected, then this is a way it could be done

is equally, if not more so likely, that our big baron has more money than we could ever imagine, and just likes owning virtual land. In the same way (on a smaller scale) that people who can afford too, own 10,12,15,more Belli properties just because they can

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Less so than it used to be. Now I see more small scale land barons offering inland property he used to own. The big Zindra land baron seems to be refocusing on high-value properties on the coast.

That's pure land speculation though, there is no trade in those properties, no market. They're priced artificially high deliberately.

Same as on Horizons, parcels aren't priced to sell, they are priced to catch a bigger fool and the price only ever goes up and up. Many of the land owners hold lots of "high value" parcels and don't ever set them for sale. The are lots of land transactions if you watch, but most of it is obscure land holding groups playing pass the hot potato.

A parcel will go up, no one will buy it because the price is absurd .. the land owner might rez a skyscraper or some other blight on the landscape, then months later it will quietly transfer ownership multiple times in rapid succession though a number of nebulous shell groups. It might get cleared .. or a house that no one ever visits might appear for a while .. and then it shuffles again and its back up for sale. Rinse and repeat.

The only clear trend is it not regular SL users. Regular users don't drop hundreds of US on a parcel, put out a pretend house and then never ever use it before letting it go back into the wash.

 

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Mollymews said:

a speculation

how could someone own so much mainland and be able to afford the tier.  It could be a too-big-to-fail situation from which the person could obtain Atlas-like status thru group tier under-payment.  A thing is that  tier is easily contributed. Top up a group to buy land, reduce the tier contribution after the land is bought

Years ago there was a way for non-Lindens to see the tier contributions of other land-owning groups of which we were not a member. Eventually the Lab disabled this, server-side, but while it was still working it was a good way to tell which groups were scamming the system like that (and, more usefully, who’d simply vanished and left their land un-abandoned but potentially available with a gentle nudge in the form of a support ticket).

The interesting thing was, everywhere I looked, the large scale “land flipper” dealers were never under-tiered like that. (Small-scale ad-farmers on the other hand quite often owned a batch of microparcels in zero-tier groups. For them, the cost of owning land was as much about the L$100 group creation fee as it was about tier or purchase price.)

I surely couldn't have checked every land dealer; I'm not even 100% sure I checked the Zindra guy (although I think I did), but at the time there sure was a lot of land fully covered by contributed tier, for sale for very long intervals.

Incidentally, there's an inherent sampling bias here. Suppose a virtual realtor has some distribution of successful and unsuccessful investments. Thing is, the most successful ones—the ones that turn over very quickly—aren't the ones we see because, duh, they're sold already. The ones we see the most are the least successful. This visibility bias probably has a fallacy named after it but I never know those names.

Speaking of fallacies, those spectacularly unsuccessful long-term holdings might be the result of an investor's "sunk cost" fallacy. But if they make up as much of their portfolio as we think, even adjusting for visibility bias, there's something else going on here.

True that a very wealthy person could simply not notice losses that would seem unsustainable to mere upper middle class users. That's a valid, potentially accurate theory, undisprovable with available instruments.

See? Land flippers are just like God.

[Cedric Brown]

On 3/7/2022 at 10:58 PM, Persephone Emerald said:

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. 

I was going to write how I agree but you said it better.

[Cedric Brown]

On 3/8/2022 at 2:51 AM, Raspberry Crystal said:

In this way virtual worlds mimic real life, and solutions take decades, never completely solve the problems, and end up in a tussle between our various needs to belong and selfish desires.
 

Boom

[Cedric Brown]

19 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

And sorry for the tangent. How 'bout them flippers, eh? FWIW, I'm pretty sure I've lost money on every piece of land I've ever sold, so we just need more land-flippers like me!

I don't know how you could lose money. You have some of the best locations on the mainland. And really nice builds.

[Cedric Brown]

We are in an all asset bubble, SL and RL. The "land barons" that I recognize have been around a long time. They have a low cost basis. I am sure when a parcel sells they make a tidy profit. But they did take a risk when they invested. They have seen land prices crater before here in SL but held on, probably bought more at the time and are currently looking good. But they eventually need buyers and we could be seeing a bursting of the all asset bubble in RL decreasing the availability of prospective buyers due to the shrinking of the wealth effect. If one has patience a nice deal can be found.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 3/7/2022 at 12:34 AM, 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 tolerate them because it means the land economy is still more or less free, even if artificial in some important respects (the auction in particular, and there is no deed office, etc.)

I don't at all agree with Scylla, who is bringing the socialist ideology to the problem. The economy needs to be free, regardless if some people make a profit. You have to think through what it means to devalue land further by making it a set price that is only a bracket around content, and elevating content further as value.

There are a lot of cliches and prejudices and stereotypes people hold in their heads about how this actually works, because they haven't lived it. I have extensive experience watching sims get chopped up by land flippers, seeing all their pernicious practices like hold-backs, and donut holes and rock-bottom prices in the hind part of the sim and crazy prices on the waterfront -- and the drawing in of land cutters with the very low prices. 

And I've also seen how this can play out with land baron wars, yet strangers coming together and still making a more or less nice sim, where in the end, the land is not the plaything of land barons. And that's because some people (like me or 2 or 3 others) were willing to buy cheap land land barons wanted to flip fast, and set very low to encourage land cutters and ad farmers -- and hold, and wait for it to settle down. And some more reputable dealers were willing to set land for a more reasonable price that wouldn't flip, but would go to a more serious and long-term owner. And people would actually discuss with their neighbours what would look good on the sim.

The solution of rolling land out like toilet paper and having people buy it for a fixed price might seem like it would fix the down side of land flipping, but it would only worsen it -- it sinks to the lowest level the lower the price is, and fixed prices don't lower value, they would only lead to way more abandonment, as no one could ever sell for more than they paid, even allowing for inflation or new costs like cashout fees or sales tax. Totally unjust -- and isn't socialism supposed to be just?

I am also wary of this concept of "adding value" which Philip Linden was also early to promote. Who decides what is valuable? I don't want to be hog-tied to somebody's culture of what "value" is when it might be the Bellisserian esthetic or worse. Many things give value to land as in RL, ranging from objective things like location adjacent to water or "Linden protection" or sentimental ties. It's not just a mesh build someone added that is transferable. 

As I have said many times before, as with most things that socialists don't like about the excessives of capitalism, the solutions are about regulation -- and not the arbitrary regulation by a committee of comrades but about fair public rules. And here the problem is in the auctions. If the Lindens publicized the names of all bidders, and the names of the winner in dedicated pages that never disappeared, and kept all the records also archived and not disappearing, you could build up a public willingness to act. When you see the name of the land baron who buys a quarter sim for US $1000 and dumps half of it, to keep the other half adjacent to Blake Sea, leaving abandoned land that then gets requested and cut up -- you know whom not to rent from or buy from. You see how the market is artificially created and you don't buy that auction flip. The Lindens then start to realize, as the land barons do, that no one is buying auction flips. This is a regulation that really is about transparency and public accountability. I don't expect it to work like a charm, as a lot of what goes on -- no one cares about or follows. Still, I think it would build up some resistance to the worst sorts of flipping. And it would help eliminate the practice some have of bidding on every auction to keep prices high. There, the Lindens could limit how many accounts you can have registered to buy on the auction, and how many bids per week. That would reduce prices and flipping right there.

Edited March 9, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

On 3/7/2022 at 5:08 PM, 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.

This is only right, from the Lindens' perspective. Somebody buys a region or a parcel on the auction or gets it abandoned; they put a very high price on it; they pay tier month after month after month; even if it doesn't sell for six months, the tier paid on it is still less than the profit they make when it sells. Again, it is the result of a free market which is artificial in that there are no costs whatsoever as in RL. But it is a RL practice in big cities to raise the rent, kick everyone out of a building, and hold it empty for months and even years on end, because the clients that pay that high rent, when they come, make up the difference. Local assemble people here have tried getting a vacancy tax passed, and it might work as people are vexed at losing a dry cleaner's and a gift shop and a coffee shop and being left with no services in their area. But in SL, you can always fly elsewhere. The vacancy tax would only make people buy less or leave SL and lose revenue for LL.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't at all agree with Scylla, who is bringing the socialist ideology to the problem.

@Scylla Rhiadra how could you, and I thought we we're all in this together !

😂

[Luna Bliss]

[Scylla Rhiadra]

41 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

@Scylla Rhiadra how could you, and I thought we we're all in this together !

😂

Well, I was told that I could join the Party . . .

I thought they meant, with cake and balloons, and stuff . . . 🙁

[Katherine Heartsong]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Well, I was told that I could join the Party . . .

I thought they meant, with cake and balloons, and stuff . . . 🙁

We do get cake, nice even pieces. If you helped bake it in some way, you get to eat part of it. Not like a bakery owner who makes us bake the cake and then eats it all themselves. (Still waiting for someone to explain the bad part about a socialist democratic system to me.)

Edited March 9, 2022 by Katherine Heartsong

[Scylla Rhiadra]

16 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Still waiting for someone to explain the bad part about a socialist democratic system to me.

Let me know when that happens. It'll be worth framing as a rarity.