More Thoughts on Risk, and on Extortion

I don't see how buying a full Mainland sim, and hoping to make money from carving up parcels and selling them, can be anything but risky. I've seen enough parcels sitting there in all their Yellow glory for 6 weeks at a time---and I 'm sure that many of them have been there for longer than that.

(I've been in Second Life...what, 80 days or so, now? I didn't start being aware of particular unsold parcels until I first started seriously thinking of buying land, which was a week or two after I registered.)

So people with money to burn buy the land and just hold it....through inattention, one would assume. After all, though prices do rise and fall, SL land isn't like REAL land. With real land, the old saying is true: they're not making any more of it.

Clearly that is the opposite of the case for SL land. If the Linden Lab people decide that it's best for business if more people buy land (and therefore pay both Premium membership and monthly tier fees), then they will make enough land so that the price of a 512m parcel is, say, US$0.50.

I mean, they could do that.

They'd have to do it very gradually, because the move would enrage all those speculators who invested thousands (and tens of thousands!) of US dollars, or the equivalent, in buying SL land. I'm sure that if this is the LL chosen course, they will try to balance the potential income from new landowners with the potential mischief to be wrought by angry land barons. Not a fun equation to work out, certainly.

But, since any movement toward fifty-cent 512's will likely be very slow, my decision making has to be based on the here-and-now. In the here and now, there is a HUGE range of prices out there.

I'm thinking of my neighbor to the east, who got ~L$22/m^2 out of me for a seafront piece (32m of coast) because the parcel was smallish (~2000m), and because it adjoined my land, and because I decided that spending about US$190 made sense in terms of the fun I want to have in the immediate future. I could rationalize that expenditure.

I'm thinking, too, of my neighbor to the west, who has also put up his seafront land for about L$22/m^2. (About a dollar higher per square meter than the East piece.) In the case of that parcel, I'm not even remotely tempted, even though his land, too, adjoins mine, and the addition would give me even more lovely beach. But I would have to come up with nearly US$700 to buy the parcel that's around 8000m. And so my sales resistance kicks in. (The sales resistance is stronger because the vast majority of the parcel is far back in the sim---not along the coast.) I could not rationalize that particular expenditure.

Of course, different people will rationalize in different ways....but in general, I think I am starting to learn something about what will tempt people, and at what price. I'd generalize that if you have a parcel that's over 8000m, and most up it is inland, people won't want to pay nearly L$23/m for it.)

Of course I could log in tonight and find it has sold.....egg on my face and whatnot. That would be okay. But I'd bet that if that DOES occur, the buyer would be either someone who is quite new to SL, or possibly the person (or group) who owns the coast just to the west of the parcel (in a different sim, but it would make for a lot of nice beachfront).

We shall see.

The 'extortion' part of my title has to do with my discovery that there are still quite a few 16m^2 parcels selling for more than L$50/m, at the top of the Land Search. I wonder how many people have taken the time to page through far enough to see that this is the case...it does take a LOT of time. (Search, for me anyway, doesn't let you search for prices above a certain level. It just doesn't work. So you have to patiently let each page load---if you go too fast, it crashes---and go through dozens of pages to get to the highest per-meter parcels.)

I thought that the recent (February?) ruling by LL that they wouldn't permit ad-farm extortion to continue, would have gotten rid of L$50/m parcels.....but, I guess not. By the time I got to those last pages, I didn't have time to also teleport to those locations. But I would be amazed if those parcels did NOT have large revolving neon signs on them......

(sorry to be cynical!)