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
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.
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.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.