Land Owner Get Greedy

[Qie Niangao]

Can it really be true that all Estates have bumped bare Homestead rents after the Land Impact increased?

I can see some Estate owners being so near-term oriented as to tweak the pricing until tenants realize they're paying more than the market. But it seems pretty implausible that every Estate would do that, knowing the first one to return to status quo ante will take nearly all their business.

[Pamela Galli]

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Torrie Mint wrote:

Why does it seem like this company is trying to run people off. I was going to get a homestead  guess I waited 1 week to long becuase now the price of tier has gone up. The land barron didnt do anything new that cost them money they dont have a new tier price put on them but because the lab decides 5000 on a homestead is the new norm their all raiseing their prices. Good job Lab thats what we all wanted higher tier. shakes head. :smileyfrustrated:

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Poor LL, they do something really great and get blamed for what a few landlords do.

[Daniel Regenbogen]

Qie, in the cases I know the reason is VAT. It is cheaper to rent a full region at 10 percent more than LL charges than buying it yourself and paying 20 percent more because of VAT.

[Qie Niangao]

Thanks Daniel. VAT is a mysterious black box to me, but I kinda suspected it was one reason. I'll be interested if anybody knows other reasons, too.

[MattMonroe]

The consequences of the actionsof a few unethical people are being overlooked and we are at a loss to stop these consequences from taking place. I am not saying that the consequences have only one cause but it is without a doubt a major contributing factor.

Within the last year it was reported that there was approximately 1 million active players of Second Life. Recently, it was reported that the number of active users had fallen to approximately 600,000. This decrease has been noticed by even Linden Labs and the prim increase for free was an effort to at least slow the decrease in active users. It is the greed that has taken a effort to restore and put that effort in jeopardy of being in effective in its meaning.

It is a shame that the consequences are being blamed on other things but its the nature of people to blame it on other people or other things. I would say to the greedy ones that you have made your bed now lie in it. Thank you for the demise of a game and lifestyle that so many of us love.

 

[Qie Niangao]

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MattMonroe wrote:

Within the last year it was reported that there was approximately 1 million active players of Second Life. Recently, it was reported that the number of active users had fallen to approximately 600,000.

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However valid your actual point may be, don't make yourself crazy with these kinds of numbers. The relevant underlying statistics haven't been public for at least five years, and the actual trends that are public show a very gradual decline. See Tyche Shepherd's gridsurvey for true historical SL metrics such as Median Daily Concurrency.

[ChinRey]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

See

Tyche Shepherd's gridsurvey

for true historical SL metrics such as

Median Daily Concurrency

.

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IMportant for everybody: remember to do as Qie did and include an important disclaimer when referring to gridsurvey.com in general: Although Tyche Shepherd is doing her best to maintain the statistics, much of the data she used to rely on haven't been available for several years and she does not clearly distinguish between the statistics that are still reliable and those that aren't. So always remember to check the timeline to see when the statisitc were last updated.

The concurrency data is still updated btw so the graph Qie referred to specifically is one of the reliable ones, apart of course from the fact that it coutns the number of accounts logged on - there's no realistic way to determine how many actual users that number represents.

The number of active users is not one of the figures LL still publishes but in June last year Ebbe accidentally slipped that the number had dropped below one milion for the first time. If we stipulate a decline rate similar to those of the concurrency and sim count figures, we'll probably end up somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000 by now (I'm not going to do the math, anybody want to check my estimate?) It is of course likely that the active user count has dropped faster than concurrency since people who use SL a lot add proportionally more to the concurrency than to the active users count and they are likely to be the last to leave. (The same applies to bots of course.) Even so, 600,000 sounds a bit low and it's certainly not an official figure since there are no official figures anymore.

[ChinRey]

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MattMonroe wrote:

The consequences of the actionsof a few unethical people are being overlooked and we are at a loss to stop these consequences from taking place. I am not saying that the consequences have only one cause but it is without a doubt a major contributing factor.

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It is indeed. In the past, especially between c. 2005 and 2012,  Linden Lab made a number of serious strategic mistakes that have hampered the development of Second Life. Some of them are only easy to see with hindsight. Others, like their failure to implement effective measures against abuse and fraudulent business practices at an early stage, they really, really should have anticipated. But they didn't and it's much harder to fix it now than it would have been to get it right from the start.

The people working with SL at Linden Lab today are actually working very hard and well trying to fix mistakes of the past. We don't usually notice this since it's such a slow process but if we look closely, we can begin to see some results now. I think it's too late to "save" SL and judging by what Ebbe has said in interviews, so does LL. (I don't even think it's possible to slow down the decline anymore but they should manage to keep it from accelrating.)

But this is way off topic. I really hope you don't give up and manage to find a new and better sim for your place. But that's up to you of course.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Some people just don't have the cash to even buy a sim on the secondary market and pay the tier which is generally due a lot sooner than a month away, but they can afford one months tier one month at a time.

Sellers figure what they want for the sim, then add any tier they've paid in advance from when it's sold to the next tier due date. Then there are the transfer fees to consider too.  Although they are billed to the seller, most add them to the price they want for their sim.

Sims at a super low price are rare.  They not only are they snapped up fast, generally tier is due real soon.  If you don't make a deal as soon as they hit the market, someone else will.  Sellers charging little are desperate for the cash and will take the fastest sale they can get.  Of course you have to hear of them first too. 

When I've bought sims cheap it's because the seller has contacted me, needed the money fast, due to a RL issue, and offered me the super low price.  They got my name from people who know I'm in the market sometimes on behalf of clients and at one time myself when I had a pretty large estate and was in the rental game back when it was more profitable.

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Someone pointed out in another thread about rent increases that a lot of them could be occuring because of the exchange rates.  People buying $L's get more for for each $1.00US than they have in the past, while landowners have to cash out their $L's and get less $US than they did a just a few months ago.  The result is renters are paying less rent in terms of RL$, while landowners are getting less rent in terms of RL$. 

Many estates run at a narrow profit margin pr were just breaking even.  Some landlords have eaten the loss on the exchange up to now but can't anymore, especially small estates that may lose their sims.  A prim increase might have been viewed as an opportune time to increase rent paid in $L's. 

The Chung estates, the largest probably in SL, just increased their rents.  Other large and small estates will probably follow the leader. 

It could very well be that we'll see more rent boxes that charge rent based on what the landowner wants in terms of $US.  In other words, if the landowner wants $10.00US a week for a parcel, then the rent box will charge whatever amount in $L's that $10.00US will buy at the time and on the day the rent is paid, as it monitors the Exchange rate.  You used to see that more back in earlier times as well as landowners who rented larger parcels only accepting rent paid to them via PayPal.

[Qie Niangao]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

 

Sims at a super low price are rare. 

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Ah, I think that was where I was confused. I had the idea that "used" sims sell for very little more than the transfer fee and remaining monthly tier -- possibly left over from when all the schools were pulling out after the Lab cancelled the educational discount, or some other market catastrophe, real or rumoured.

Also, good point about the exchange rate. Any Estate operating on slim margins would have no choice but to crank up L$-denominated tier... and as to any cost reductions from the grandfathered rate buy-down, I imagine the largest Estates were already getting rates that good or better, either from their own originally "grandfathered" sims or from Atlas Program-like deals over the years.

[Prokofy Neva]

It won't be detrimental to the business. I notice that some of the biggest stores making the largest amount of cash move multiple times a year, likely seeking better rental deals or who knows why.

Customers come from search mainly and via events, so if you physically move it's not that big a deal. You leave an LM giver for a time on the old sim and move.

In my view, it's only fair to pass along a savings to your customers if you yourself got one. I don't charge anyone for the new extra prims in my rentals because LL isn't charging.

So move if you've got a landlord that you view as greedy who is doing this. Surely the cost of continuing to pay the high rent is greater than the cost of absorbing the wrenches from the move. Make sure you put an ad in search/places and you will be fine.