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From the Second Life Blog : Quarterly Land Supply and Island Pricing Update Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:25 PM by: Jack Linden As with my previous quarterly posts, here is an update on land, including supply, average prices, abandoned/defunct land and pricing information relevant to Q2 of 2008. This is a little later than I’d have liked, mainly due to one of the items, Island Pricing, needing a bit more time to finalize. I’ll come to that part shortly. It’s a long post, so join me after the cut.. Land Supply The average Mainland price has risen steadily over the first few months of 2008 and now sits at around L$11.5 per meter (with a median price below L$10 per meter). These figures exclude L$0 transactions, group transactions and any that involve Governor Linden such as auctions. On average around 640,000m are traded between residents each day, with a further 410,000m traded to or from Groups. In total then, that’s around 1,050,000m or 16 regions worth of land traded daily on the Mainland estate.
On private estates, where parcels can also be traded, the average price for the initial sale has stayed steady at around L$3.6 per meter with a daily total traded of approximately 990,000m so slightly less than Mainland. On the back of these numbers, we therefore intend to increase the supply of Mainland for Q2. During April and into May we will increase supply to at least 10 regions per day. Clearly we will be monitoring the market closely and adjust supply if it is necessary. We have a new continent in the wings, and will be preparing that for auction over the coming weeks. In addition, we will shortly be dropping the opening auction price for new whole regions to USD$750 from the current start price of USD$1250. That additional supply along with lower auction start price will hopefully encourage more people to take part and keeps some downward pressure on the Mainland price per meter which has been rising recently. Abandoned/Defunct Land Land can come back to us in several ways but the two most significant ones are where a resident abandons land they no longer want or when an account is closed or becomes defunct in some way, whilst still owning land. In both cases we investigate, clear the land and recycle it by selling the land at auction. Coming into 2008 we had a backlog of defunct land so we have been putting a lot of effort into clearing that backlog which improves the Mainland and keeps down the amount of litter. Current numbers show that we have successfully recycled 3,071,056m of land formerly held by closed or defunct accounts in Q1, with a further 700,000m still to work through, most of which are small parcels below 64m in size. Abandoned land has remained at around the same level, we have recycled it at about the rate it has come back to us so we have more work to do there. Right now we have approximately 950,000m of abandoned land at least some of which was a consequence of the changes to our policy on ad farming (I hope to post some numbers on this soon). Abandoned land tends to be time consuming to process as often it has been abandoned by accident, which has to be investigated. During Q2 we will continue to aggressively recycle land back onto the market. Island Pricing Our new Land Store is moving through testing and will be launched in April, perhaps within a week or two depending on how final testing goes. It will be cross browser compatible and will provide nearly instant delivery of a new island after completing checkout. For Q2 our Island pricing is changing. New islands will be USD$1000 and this change will go live upon the new Land Store being launched, so before the end of April. Orders placed before the launch will be at the current USD$1675 pricing. Monthly fees will remain the same for Q2. No doubt there will be lots of questions about how this affects those residents that have ordered islands very recently, and how it affects Openspaces or the Educational pricing. I will follow up with a much more detailed blog post in a day or two, so well before the new Land Store is launched; do please be patient while we get all the information finalised for you. At the end of Q2 we will review pricing once again and post a similar update including pricing information for Q3.
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