Bart Heart on SL Land

By SL Hak

Bart Heart is the CEO of Bart Heart Estates and Valentine Heart Inc., he's a respected estate owner with 40 sims in his stable. I am just a poor scribe, homeless and seeking to learn from those that have been there, seen it and still prospering. So as I see it LL has flooded the market, by releasing large quantities of sims, they then reduce the estate purchase price creating an even greater demand for regular sims and Openspace. LL are now busy marketing the Bay City sims, a nine strong group of sims, which is as a close that LL is likely to get to estate management. All of these reasons combine in squeezing the estate owner, how far they are pressured and how they'll react is what I'd like to know. So this is my simplistic view of the problem, am I right? Bart Heart was kind enough to address my concerns and explain what he sees.

“The basics are supply and demand, LL has been adding more sims then there are people coming to SL. I feel that is the main problem the land is having and why the price is down. But the price drop has not affected us at this time. What does affect us is the amount of land out there that people have to look at before they find us. Most of the residents that come to us are referred to us from other residents. We have all of our land at or below 1L$ for the sims that Bart Heart Estates (BHE) owns.

Our tier prices is where we make our profit, and yes our tier prices are a little higher then the competition, but you get what you pay for. We are online 24 hours a day to help out. All of our offline messages go directly to our phone and we respond as soon as we get the messages or send a staff member that is online to help out. 95% of the residents we have have been with us for 6 month or longer. About 5% that leave to go to other estates but they come back after they see the service that the others give, or the rules they have to follow.

BHE has a relaxed covenant, there are only about 5 rules to follow and they are: must be used for residential purposes, be kind to your neighbors, do your part to minimize lag, maintain your prim limit and pay your tier. All basic common sense. We have also set it up more like a community we set up roads on BHE South and on BHE North made it rolling hills with water and beach sims, all connected with water ways. We also have community areas for the residents to use like the island on Heart Break Lake, a small park to just relax, or on Valentine Vineyard, there is a small church and at the vineyard there is a ball room on the second floor that we use for community events or the residents can use at any time at no charge. So basically I feel that the land pricing will not affect BHE since our land is already set to 1L$ per meter and our service is better the LL or most of the other estate owners give.

When you look at the page with the Economic Statistics,   the price of land is going for an average of 3.64L$ per meter, down from 5.05L$ per meter last month, down about 28%. What is not stated on this page is that it includes estate land. For example when Valentine Heart Inc. (VHI) gets an open sim we only charge tier for it, so I set is for 35,000L$ for the 65000 meters, this is only 0.53L$ per meter, which is tier only. This has an effect on the stats that LL put out. I feel it is very mislead, and believe the reason that LL does this is to entice new people to come to SL and look of cheap land, even though most people don’t see this stat, till they are already in SL. But LL can state publicly that land is only 3L$ per meter. But it is the same reason they state there is a total of 13,635,913 residents. And we all know that about 10 million are alts, bots or people that signed up and are no longer in SL. They deflate the land value numbers and inflate the resident number to look good. When they need to be advertising SL, especially right now since EA Land / The Sims Online (TSO) is closing its virtual world in the next couple of months, I believe it is August 1st.

Now the reason with the price reduction in sims from $1675 to $1000, this is a great business decision from LL if you look at it in number. Before if LL sold 100 sims at $1675 they got $167,500 and in one year they would get $360,000 in tier. Now for the same up front price of $167,000 they can sell 167 sims and make $601,000 on the first year of tier. So they will now bring in an extra $241,000 per 100 sims they sell and if you look at it in the total sims per month they sell, over the next year they will bring in about an extra $1 million USD a year on one month of private island sales, and this doesn’t include the open sims. The reduction in the private sims may have an effect on our land, but just like the last time we will survive, summer time always seems to be the slow time for land sales. At least the last 2 summers have been that way. The real estates in SL will stay, and the fly by night get rich quick estates will fall. It happened before and it will happen again.

I don't think that the new sims of Bay City will have a direct effect on estate land. I see it as land that is going to have over priced value and LL making a lot of money on it from the auction price, all depending on how they decide to release it in auction. I plan to look at the prices and maybe pick up a piece of it. But I fell that it will be just like the other themed areas the LL has put out in the past, Boardman, Shermerville, West Haven and even the sim that LL has that are 40 meter terraforming Da Boom, Tan, Maroon and the rest of the color named sims. But some will remember that Shermerville use to have 9 sims total and they didn’t sell, so LL had to reduce it to 2 sims then they sold it as first land. I bought a 512 meter lot for 512L$ as my first land, I sold that for 100KL$ 6 months later, when I went into private islands. I see some lots for sale in Shermerville that are set at about an average of 75KL$ but I don't see anyone buying at that price for a 512 meter lot, when they can get an open sim for about the same price and get 130 times more land. Bay City will be a novelty land, it will be fun at first then it will die out after the hype dies off, just like the other theme land LL has made. SO we at BHE and VHI have no worries with the land prices dropping or LL creating more themed land. It makes the world go around.”

Confidence abound, it's good to hear. If you have contrary views ,please post here or IM/e-mail Hak on This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it