Auto-expire mainland abandoned parcel reservations that aren't purchased
under review
9XX Resident
There's a problem on mainland that's quietly eating into land availability and into Linden Lab's own revenue and almost no one is talking about it.
I keep running into parcels that were requested from Linden Lab, reserved under someone's name and then never actually bought. They don't sit for a day or two. They sit for months. Sometimes years.
Every one of those parcels is dead land. No one else can request it, no one can buy it, no one can build on it even when the original requester has clearly walked away and has zero intention of completing the purchase. The land just rots under a name. And this isn't a rare edge case; once you start looking, it's everywhere. Multiply it across the grid and you're looking at a real chunk of mainland that's been pulled out of circulation for no reason other than a abandoned land reservation that never expires.
Here's the part Linden Lab should care about most: while that parcel sits reserved but unpurchased,
it generates no tier.
It stays in limbo under LL, nobody owns it, and nobody is paying monthly land fees on it. The moment a real buyer takes it, that's recurring tier revenue flowing to Linden Lab every month, ongoing. So every parcel locked behind a dead reservation isn't just frustrating for residents; it's money LL is leaving on the table, month after month, for land that someone else would happily pay tier on right now.Mainland already has enough working against it. Locking up land indefinitely behind dead reservations makes it actively worse it shrinks supply, kills circulation, blocks active residents who actually want to expand and invest, and quietly costs Linden Lab tier income it should be collecting.
Here's the part that makes it more frustrating: from what I've seen, there's a 48-hour window in play if the requester doesn't buy the parcel within 48 hours, the parcel can be requested by someone else. I say "from what I've seen" because it's inconsistent: sometimes the 48-hour policy is mentioned in the support ticket response, and sometimes it isn't mentioned at all. Either way, claiming it still means filing a ticket and waiting a couple of days for a Land Linden to respond. So the fix already exists in spirit; it's just buried behind a manual, multi-day process almost no one will bother with. Why make everyone burn time, energy, and resources on a ticket and a wait? Automate it.
And honestly, most people don't even know the 48-hour rule exists. Most won't check the claimed date or the date in the title. Some Lindens use the title date to show when a parcel was allocated, but the average person just glances at it, sees it's already allocated to someone, and moves on. So the one safeguard that does exist is invisible to the people it's supposed to help.
Proposed change:
make the expiration automatic. If a resident requests a parcel but doesn't complete the purchase within a set window (7 days would be more than fair), the reservation expires on its own and abandoned parcels return to the abandoned land pool.
This is a small policy change with a real, grid-wide payoff. It costs Linden Lab almost nothing, requires no new system anyone has to learn, immediately frees up land that's currently doing nothing for no one, and starts converting dead reservations into actual tier-paying owners. For something that directly affects both usable mainland availability and LL's own land revenue
And if I've misunderstood any part of how this currently works, or gotten a detail wrong, please correct me.
Log In
Prokofy Neva
In my experience over many years, requesting numerous abandoned parcels, I have found that if I don't pick up the parcel quickly -- it is 48 hours technically but certainly never longer than 7 days -- then I lose it for good and it falls back into abandoned status whereby someone else could request it.
Perhaps there is such an overloaded inventory of requested but not-picked-up land that the Lindens can't move it to "available" status again, but I think the reason this phenomenon occurs so often is another area that lacks transparency.
Some land parcels, sometimes owned solely, sometimes owned by a group where there may be multiple tier donors, are seized by Lindens -- you can see the name of a single Linden on them instead of the usual "Governor Linden" and just held -- sometimes for more than 90 days. It is difficult to know what is transpiring there. Some group has gotten more than the 60 days after which absence of tier in a group means that some land is seized? (And yes, they indeed seize it). Some group has a special reprieve to round up their deadbeat tier contributor who has been MIA for 61 or more days? SOMETHING is happening here that is often WAY MORE than 90 days and can stretch even to a year at times, as I have personally witnessed. Since their content is not removed from the land, those people who failed to pay their single or group tier still enjoy the use of their land, essentially.
Why we ALL can't get a year to pay tier on land is a mystery, but SL abounds in such mysteries. Perhaps this category of land is merely a backlog as well.
Group-owned land in which one of the parties -- or alts -- has failed to pay some of the tier is a category that tends not to be automatically surfaced to the Linden eye. And this is not only because they need the tier of large groups (especially land baron rentals groups), and not only because they are overloaded. It's because they don't have a system for AUTOMATIC reporting TO THE OWNERS that the group is undertired. A group owner has to "just know" from manual checking that his group is in trouble. A Linden may or may not get to warning him within 48 hours. This system needs to be automated and not manual.
Oatmeal Linden
updated the status to
under review
Hello 9XX! Thank you for reporting this issue. We are aware and are currently reviewing parcel ownership and status across the mainland. You may gradually note improved or updated availability as we move through the thousands of regions.
If there is a parcel that you have an interest in acquiring, please feel free to file a support ticket under Land&Region > Abandoned Land and we can review its availability for you!
Cooter Coorara
I've been looking to buy an abandoned region. Looking at a map, I see continents full of "not-quite regions" that are abandoned everywhere. By "not quite", that would be a full region with a 1024 smack in the middle of it. This 1024 (2048, whatever) has a claim date of 2016 or so. The traffic count is zero. Sometimes there's a build on it, sometimes not. I've filed tickets asking about these parcels, and I never get an answer other than "it's not available".
So 9XX, I agree with you, but I would like to ride your coattails to add the old parcels that are not abandoned, but are just sitting unused and unloved. It is preventing many regions from being sold, I think. Who wants to pay tier for a full region, but have a 1024 squatter in the middle that you can never buy out or evict?
Naughty Rascal
Cooter Coorara sitting unused and unloved but being paid for would not be a squatter. If you submit a ticket and the account is not in good standing LL will either sell it to you or put up for auction. I've been through this in the past. And yes, most times the land is not available because the owner is in good standing. Calling people squatters just because you want what they "own" and want them gone is diabolical. Y'all are wild.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Cooter Coorara Derrick addressed this issue at Meet the Lindens and said they have an obligation to provide these landowners' lands as long as their tier is covered, so while he acknowledged that this is inconvenient for others, the owners of these parcels have the right to keep their lands even if they don't log in, and a "reasonable expectation that their land will still be there when they return".
Cooter Coorara
Naughty Rascal I agree that if the owner of the parcel is paying tier, then the land is theirs. Fine. But I cannot believe that vast swathes of regions have parcels that have sat unused for years, with a traffic count of 0, are all having tier paid. Sure, some folks die and there may be some bank account somewhere that tier is being paid from, but from my RL experience, these bank accounts are closed by the estate within a few months of the person's passing. If the person was still alive and still paying tier after years of not logging into SL, it seems to me that it would be very unusual. I also check the group that owns the land (usually they're group owned). The land usually shows the status of each group member as "status unknown).
I own about 40,800 sqm of the region my business is in now. I've contacted every landowner in my region asking them to keep me in mind if they ever decide to sell. I've since bought several parcels that way. Right smack dab in the middle of my model displays (I build homes, schools, churches, etc.) is a 2048 parcel with an old, but very nice home on it. The parcel is group owned by four people. The status of every avi is "status unknown". All joined SL in 2005, except the one alt that was created in 2007. The land was claimed in 2019 so they were in SL for fourteen years at least. None responded to my IMs. Each of their profiles have empty feeds, indicating that if they are still in SL they are inactive.
I'm not speaking of any particular region that I want to snag. I am not trying to scoop up some prime region and boot people out of their homes. I'm just a guy looking to buy a region for my (finally!) rapidly growing business and in all of my searching, I've found exactly two for sale privately. Both were for sale for the going price of $1 sqm, which is fair, but are on sides of very steep hills.
Could I buy an island? I can't afford the setup fee. Could I rent an island? Way too expensive. So I occasionally check the auction, or use maps to look around. For now, I'll just stay where I am, paying for 3/4ths of a region. The house in the middle of things that I don't own, I just put signs around it saying so.
Perhaps instead of auctions, LL should maintain an online list of abandoned parcels. That would be way easier to check.
Prokofy Neva
AlettaMondragon Resident I would ask a more pointed question to the Lindens at these Office Hours which I generally cannot attend. And that would be whether now, in the year 2026, they can see their way clear to emptying the grid of the "industry giveaways" of 1024s that they handed out to tech influencers of various types especially in the 2006-2007 period. I have "reversed engineered" this hypothesis for curiously unattended land and land even with people missing from the People List, generally a sign of "non-payment".
And I have made this hypothesis on the basis of finding land under the ownership of certain tech influencers or industry people the Lindens themselves hoped to influence -- because I knew their avatar names and could contact them in RL -- and discovering than they had no idea that their glowing build with untextured prims was still in the view with their name on it. They had not visited SL in 20 years.
This is a class of ownership, evidently. The Lindens can review it. In the RL states of Maine, New Hampshire, certain other states with large land tracts, the state may seize your land if you do not prove that you have maintained it over the years by mowing fields, marking boundaries, etc. The Lindens have to take the same attitude to land that has sat unattended for 20 years now once handed out to industry insiders.
Then next, they could take the same attitude to another category: their early adapters who had group land and builds but who are now missing from the People List for a decade or more. It's hard to let go. But they could make a Linden build thanking them (as they did for those in the actual beta) and start freeing up land to put it under tier again.
AlettaMondragon Resident
First a direct copy from my comment on the forum topic:
I agree with you that your solution would probably improve the flow of land sales. I think it's worth noting, however, that Land Lindens might review these offers case by case and they might think it is worth keeping some of them up so that the recipient might take the offer eventually. In other cases when they are working on abandoned land in the region, they will probably merge it with the rest of abandoned land again, divide it in a different way, start an auction, etc. I've seen examples of these, if we assume in good faith that they keep track of these lands and don't just do this randomly, they might see a bigger picture and it might be worth for them to do it this way. Or so they think at least.
Adding to that:
I think it would help even more if
all land sale offers
expired after some time. Not necessarily 7 days, but 30 days or less. This would make it necessary for resident landowners as well to reconsider the price they ask for their lands, instead of the common practice that they keep parcels up for sale at unreasonably high prices, even when they are away from SL, sometimes for years.Prokofy Neva
AlettaMondragon Resident The Lindens have automatic systems run as code-as-law; and they have private discretionary systems run on policies, that may or not be examined properly after 20 years -- and it's hard to know sometimes the difference. On the one hand, you could see that the Lindens, as a discretionary private entity, could let some big land holders have more than 61 days or more than 90 days or even 120 days to pay their tier. We all wish we had these perks. We all don't, I can tell you from experience.
In theory, you'd want them to exercise their discretion in granting this or that deadbeat another 30 or 60 or 120 days if they like, given that the it is unlikely that anyone else will tier a pink flat topped mountain in G, or whatever kind of land you might imagine. They now work much harder and with greater efficiency to free up these pink mountains and these flat grey nothing landlocked sims never landscaped. And so on. But be careful what you wish for. The discretionary policy they are willing to exercise in some cases and provide some leniency to make themselves and their customers viable -- if replaced by a brutal, coded automatic "one size fits all" code-as-law -- may be the unpiloted train that comes for you and your land some day and you won't want that.
As noted very many times before, you may not be aware that high land prices are set above all to appear on the map, as the LAND category of SEARCH is dysfunctional and little used. Furthermore, at the bulk rate of tier ($166/sim) and given a low purchase price, a landowner can wait all year for a sale and still make a profit.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Prokofy Neva I focused on sales in my comment and I will stick to that for the sake of this suggestion. I'm aware of the practice to keep land highlighted on the map by keeping it listed for sale. I've been suggesting it for years that we need a major world map overhaul, which, among other things, would provide a rental overlay, not only sale and auction, as well as custom overlays for which you could apply the texture like the parcel photo. So if you have a diner for example, you could have your diner sign on a custom map overlay and wouldn't have to use sky sign objects. Would this mean nobody would want to keep land listed for sale for long times anymore? Certainly not, but it would probably reduce it greatly, so in that case it might not even be necessary for land sales to expire. I don't think they'll do any map overhaul, though. They barely managed to fix it twice in 2021 when it was completely broken.
Prokofy Neva
AlettaMondragon Resident The Lindens could in principle or should ban "skywriting" and misuse of "land for sale" yellow for what are in fact rentals. That's a big policing job that perhaps they can automate with AI, but what price is too high for land that someone in fact hopes to sell at high market but legitimate prices, but will accept for rent if all else fails? I find it to be a despicable practice but I myself am forced to put a few lots in this category -- which requires that I not be an absentee landlord and that I quickly take the land off sale when someone rented it -- or if it is bought while they are AFK, be prepared to refund them in full. Not every landlord does this.
Sure, having overlays that say "maybe for rent/maybe for sale" or "for rent" which we do not have currently-- but another solution is to reform the LAND FOR SALE/RENT in the SEARCH function on the inworld browser which has numerous flaws discussed elsewhere. The Lindens can't or won't fix LAND FOR SALE/RENT even with one simple clearing of cache, or one simple addition of the ability to fixate a term and keep refinding instead of starting anew with each sub-category.
Currently, the World Map does not update in real time. It can be out of date for hours -- even days -- often. The map can seem to show the green dot of your dear friend -- when in fact it turns out he may have died in RL even if logged off. Etc. The minimap is more reliable but also not perfect.
I think the Lindens will not allow more categories to creep on to the map overlays. "Land for Rent" is not something they are really fond of now (as they once were ages ago despite their own early adapter heavy resistance). They want it to be on islands; they don't want it to be on Mainland. If they put "Rent" as a coded category that shows up on the map, they might also want to take 10% of each rental revenue as they do on the Marketplace. You always have to be careful what you wish for here.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Prokofy Neva A recurring fee for the rental listing would make much more sense than taking a commission from the rental revenue, which would be nearly impossible to do. I don't think it would be necessary in any form. If they never wanted to take money from rentals for advertising their lands through setting them for sale, they shouldn't get this idea in this proposed case either. Of course consistency is not LL's greatest strength.
Prokofy Neva
AlettaMondragon ResidentCommission from highly expensive rental systems -- two early adapters had a virtual monopoly on this functionality in SL -- were embedded in the earliest culture of SL until a third person came along and destroyed them with an open-source rentals script that did NOT take commissions. The Lindens talked openly of putting rentals in search/on the map but also charging a tax for this which they could easily code, just as they easily collect 30L a week for Search Places or 10L for an upload. It's a trivial matter. If you want your offering to show on the map -- or even in search at all -- you will use
the viewer's built-in rental system
and not your own separate scripted box. This was openly discussed. They could return to it any time.AlettaMondragon Resident
Prokofy Neva Oh this is actually very interesting. I don't think it would be a good solution, though, because then people would try to use workarounds that would be still free, instead of paying for the rental listings or a commission. Not that a L$30 per week rental listing fee for a parcel would be a problem for a rental business, but obviously if there's a free alternative... I think it wouldn't solve any problems.
N
Nya Jules
You are proposing that land that isn't bought within 7 days gets automatically abandoned, and you claim that this would get LL more revenue.
In my eyes this is a false conclusion. I don't know what the percentage of people is that buy land later than 7 days, but considering that a ticket may take 7 days until the parcel is assigned to you I believe it is not zero. Therefore you are losing the revenue generated by late payers. They may request the land again, maybe, maybe not. Like with any other purchase, if I cannot buy the item now, maybe I buy it in another week, maybe I don't buy it at all.
At the same time it is unlikely that there is someone just waiting for the parcel to become available, because there is so much available land, and premium land goes to auction anyway. So in my eyes, you will rather risk losing revenue, and not generate more.
And if we're just looking at the revenue, it doesn't really matter what would be "fair". Would it be fair if land got abandoned after 7 days of not picking it up if 2 other people are just waiting to buy it? Sure. Is that realistic that 2 other people are waiting to buy it? No.
Furthermore, how many parcels of that pool of unclaimed land has a reasonable size, which would be 512m²+? 20? 50? I doubt it's more. Out of how many? 100k parcels?
The costs of developing and implementing a system to automatically abandon unclaimed parcels would need decades to amortize (if it did at all.) Instead, as of right now, you can just file a regular abandoned land ticket for unclaimed land.
I agree that in theory an automation would be nice (actually, an automated reminder beforehand would be perfect.) In practice I believe the gains are completely negligible.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Nya Jules Some parcels are stuck in auction as well for example with no active auction ID, and some parcels offered by residents stay up for sale at those ridiculously high prices for years. One is definitely a bug, the other is simply stupid. If a sale expiry were applied to all of these, Lindens and resident landowners would have to review their lands for sale more often, which would be a good opportunity to revise the price, etc.
N
Nya Jules
AlettaMondragon Resident Not sure what you're talking about. The feedback is about abound land set to sale for residents, not about parcels set to sale by residents. If you think that it would be a great idea to automatically cancel parcels set to sale by residents, you should open another feedback request. But I don't think it will be successful.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Nya Jules Oops sorry, I must be in the wrong town. I didn't know this was
Orwell
. Don't mind me!Qie Niangao
I occasionally notice some parcels that seem stuck in "for sale to…" limbo. I don't know how many there are really. The thing is, I'm not confident that the Land team knows that either. If they're not managing the parcels set for sale, this would be a way to get that off their plate.
Prokofy Neva
Qie Niangao Well then you can ask, either directly in a communication to a Linden with a SLURL. Or with a ticket, which is the preferable method.
Qie Niangao
Prokofy Neva Sure, but this isn't a problem for folks who know the parcels have been long stuck "for sale to…", but rather those who do
not
know, which is the usual case: those who notice some land, are interested enough to investigate, only to find it's unavailable because it's set for sale to a specific resident. They're not going to come back a month later to see if maybe the parcel wasn't bought so they should now file a ticket (or worse, adopt a habit of filing such tickets for every "for sale to…" parcel on the off chance it's another one stuck in limbo).But to me it's not so much about the individual parcels. I don't know how many are stuck in this state (although I bet it's way, _way_ more than the "20? 50?" Nya Jules suggests) and that's what's most broken here:
nobody
knows, and as I said, that includes the Lab. And maybe it's true that there's so damned much abandoned land now that nobody cares about any of it so nobody bothers to follow up, but even if the situation is that grim, it's a hell of a message to be sending.AlettaMondragon Resident
Qie Niangao I would ask if really nobody knows, though. When a parcel is stuck in auction mode long after the auction is over, it's owned by the Governor, so they would have a really hard time searching for it, but the parcels for sale and direct sale to someone are owned by individual land team Lindens, not the Governor or any other technical account, so they should be able to check their own lands and revise these as needed. I could imagine that they just don't do it, but I think they eventually do when they want to do something else on a particular land. Auctioning off the whole abandoned land in the region, someone else requested it, a project like NBM or SFV, etc. In these cases they will deal with those previously offered but not taken parcels, too. I suspect it just isn't worth the effort to monitor all of these all the time when the land would be abandoned otherwise.
Prokofy Neva
Qie NiangaoI think that the class of people who spot one of these parcels in "limbo" randomly and then didn't ask about them in a ticket but "came back a month later" or even "didn't know to come back later" is likely vanishingly small. The reality is, it bothers people
on that particular sim
or those who just monitor the general state of the Mainland and find it unhealthy. But there's so much abandoned land, even with the Lindens' more efficient disposal of it now, that if you are really bothered by a "donut hole" on your tract, you can go to another full sim and set up shop there in peace. And yes, it is definitely more than 20-50. It is in the 100s and 100s at the very least. Someone could easily enough make a spreadsheet of them and try to get action from LL. If this REAAAALY was the bane to someone's existence, and they had no way of getting other land, or prim land on their sim, indeed they would keep filing tickets. They wouldn't have to find out the size of the entire class of such parcels. I'm happy to work with you on making a big spreadsheet of these parcels if you like, I know where bunches of them are. I remember once long ago you were so kind as to make a spreadsheet of every single parcel in Ross, which is a real chore even with groups listing land parcels now, to determine how the prims could possibly have been blown off the sim there (it actually was a Linden error).
But like the land in Cymru (Gaeta I!) which was mistakenly put to auction when everybody is supposed to move out of there to Zindra 2.0 or elsewhere, sometimes mistakes are made and then fixed. And I think the bottom line is the Lindens have a category of land which they say is "supported" -- they won't say HOW and the public-facing owners are MIA -- and that's their call. I dont think it can be tackled as a generic even by confronting them with a list of 238 parcels or whatever. Those on a sim who need a certain parcel need to ticket them.