When I first spoke with the RA about my hopes for this term, which will be half over shortly, they included expansion for CDS. However, the land conditions for maintaining a high occupancy rate (our first goal, to break even) and expansion (a second goal which some of us hold) have changed significantly. [1}
Our first fiscal goal is to keep our stable expenses paid, and our largest expense by far is tier. So our vacancy rate is our key metric. Ours may be going up, but I'm informed that it is not yet near historical highs.
It's well to think of our vacancy rates as the occupancy rate of an apartment building: Is enough rented out to pay our expenses, starting with tier to the Lindens? Our occupancy rate is lower than usual, right now, though not yet catastrophic.
CDS long have had a persistent knot of slow-pays and no-pays. We are at something like half our peak number, at the moment, and Sudane and I are dealing with it. It's always been CDS practice to provide individual data for privacy reasons. Dealing with it, on the whole, I think -- though our laws retard us. I plan to propose change to those laws to the RA in 2 weeks, to shorten the number of months to evict nonpayers from the current 3 month wait.
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One can immediately see what land is for sale in CDS, because for the past year or so, we have used the "yellow map" direct sale system, and available land shows on the SL maps. Incidentally I believe that was a marketing mistake -- and also will propose change there.
As Pat Murakami points out elsewhere [2], land actions in CDS often have been held up by interminable politicking. Let's do better and *take* the opportunities we have.
Regards JP
[1] The great majority of successful themed sim estates in CDS who we know have expanded significantly. Quite a few of our citizens have themselves created large estates, some with dozens of sims, during the tenure of CDS. Others also have flourished. (Antiquity, Caledon, Winterfell, and the Azure Islands come immediately to mind.) Going by opening dates, CDS launched no sims from November 2006 (Colonia Nova) to December 2007 (Alpine Meadows)> Thojse dates roughly were the beginning and end dates of the land boom in Second LIfe. So: if that matters, we missed it. Now, most of those estates, even the most successful ones, are suffering significantly higher vacancy rates.
[2] http://forums.slcds.info//viewtopic.php ... =15#p12223 "in the CDS; in the past we would have held such debates for ages and spun our wheels squandering enthusiasm and goodwill in the process. The traditional complaint has been that the RA acts too slowly and that the CDS takes ages to make decisions!"