Her success prompted others to try it for themselves. But with a price tag of $ 1675 USD up front and an additional $ 295 USD each month, a sim was not cheap. This meant that to some extent, becoming a land baron was reserved for the wealthy or the hardcore SL-ers prepared to make an investment. As of September 2007, you could expect to pay around L$17000 for a 2048sqm parcel in the form of an upfront fee! And then you'd have tier on top of that in the region of L$1200/week. For a 4096sqm parcel, an upfront fee of anything from L$ 20000 upwards and around L$ 2500/week. When you consider that these upfront fees would be paid every single time someone new bought a parcel, given the turnover rates of residents on private estate, the estate owners were laughing all the way to the bank.In March 2008 the Lindens dropped a bombshell. Sims were dropping to $1000 USD. They had effectively just devalued estate owner's holdings by around 40% in the click of a finger. Of course, this did not go down too well with existing estate owners, though went down rather well with those who had always thought about the possibility of trying estate ownership for themselves and never gotten around to it. This led to immense market saturation in a very short period of time. At the same time, Linden Labs also announced that the
openspace sim (as it was known at the time) was to improve. Once upon a time you would have had to buy at a time and would have gotten very few prims on it. Linden Lab announced that the prims were rising to 3750 and sims could be bought individually by those who already owned at least one full prim sim. This led to thousands of openspace sims being used as homes and businesses, massively denting the demand for parcels on full prim sims. Of course, this was shortly followed by an announcement that, because people were using the homestead sims as homes and businesses when they were intended as light use, the prices were rising to $125 with no grandfathered tier options for those who had held the sims for a certain length of time. The Lindens soon realised the idiocy of this decision following resident outcry and settled instead for Grandfathering certain 'homesteads' as they became known, at $95/month. The 'openspace' became an entirely different type of sim with just 750 prims, primarily used for sailing.So the situation as it is today is a saturated market with more demand for homestead sims and proportionally fewer full prim parcels selling than two years back. Homestead offer fewer prims per parcel, but more space and 'privacy'. So consumers must weight up prims versus privacy in deciding where to buy and what type of land to buy.
But the bulk of the Second Life private estate companies now take no up front fee for land. This means that where it was once possible to make an initial investment of $1675 and recoup that very quickly at the same time as being able to expand rapidly, this is no longer possible. Therefore, anyone starting out with just one sim had an incredibly hard time even getting going. The yellow patches of "land for sale" on the private estate maps are excessive. It's a buyer's market. Older companies are selling up their sims and moving on and the newer ones are struggling to even make a mark on the world of virtual real estate. Disillusioned estate owners are trying their luck on alternative platforms like Openlife.
I managed a real estate company in Second Life from September 2007 to June 2009. I saw the major changes and the difficult transitions faced by estate owners and it saddens me to see the state of private estate in world today. The reality is that to start out in real estate in Second Life now, you face bleak prospects. You can either put in the $1000 and struggle to break even for months, while waiting months again to be able to afford a second sim from the income of the first or you need to put in $10000 plus. Either of those options still leaves you with the monumental task of filling your sims up.
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