Trying to find a fair (and reasonably fiscally sound) way to sell the land controlled by our government can be a challenge.
-- We've often been in high demand, with more buyers than land to sell. It took me months and months to buy into CDS in 2006-07. We're getting there again, I am pleased to see.
-- In the ancien regime, parcel availability was posted on the former web site, but with a lot of laggy update issues.
-- In practice, Sudane as estate owner just kept track of buyers and sellers, and tried to match them up. Practical, but not transparent. Also, more work for her than she wants, or we deserve from her.
-- We usually have "pre-sold" new full sims. The good news? Fiscal safety. The bad news (in my opinion)? Existing residents swoop in and often get all the best lots, so that for citizen expansion purposes, only the apparently-less-attractive lots are left over.
-- We have been changing our laws to give ourselves some more options.
Here's what I am doing in the short term. We are experimenting with some options to see what works best.
1. Five residential Altstadt Neufreistadt lots go on sale tomorrow (Wednesday SLT). See the next announcement (dated today) for details. Open sale, no special rules (except that the NFS covenants apply, obviously).
2. Commercial land in NFS and CN (at least 6 lots) will be opened for BID on Thursday. See the announcement here, on Thursday SLT, for details. Our revised commerce laws require a bidding process ... I had to make one up :D so it took a little time, sorry. Per our laws, some of them will be offered at the 50% rent rate. This will include the CN city parcels that the Guild has proposed to re-parcel (modify boundaries).
3. All other land *reclaimed* by CDS will be re-sold later this month using the beta test of our new land management methods. Which, unlike open sale, will attempt to incorporate some availability-transparency and intake management. More postings on that within a week. I committed to the RA to run that test during January :) so here we are.
There are some other steps we ought to take in the longer range, but that will be for the new RA (seated 1 Feb) and the government they select. I will post some notes about my suggestions as a part of the chancellor application process (in the General Discussion thread), later this month.
Regards Jamie