Peakmonsters is a tool I use probably 100 times a day because it makes what I do faster and it gives me information I can't get in game.
But, if you rely on Peakmonsters to do everything for you, you can damage both your rental income and the entire market. Make sure you always check what's happening before you just hit load and submit it.
Take a look at this picture.
In this case I'm having to lower my price on creeping ooze from 3 dec down to 1.966.
While this use to rent very well at 3, we've had some big renters come into the market and undercut with walls of inventory that are just too thick to pass through so they will now be undercut relentlessly by everyone until they drive the price to zero.
But that's another post.
Here what I want to talk about is the price Peakmonsters gave me when I hit "LOAD" to load the cheapest price. I don't know exactly how that button is coded but I'd have to imagine that somewhere in the process of doing this, someone posted a really lowball ooze. So when I hit lowest price, Peakmonsters doesn't take into account that there's only one of those at that price and its a seriously huge undercut. It just puts my 15 units at an even lower price.
Now you can see below that PeakM doesn't even list this ghost listing. It lists the current lowest price at 1.764. SO if I were bent on never letting anyone else get another sale and driving the price down, I would put it at 1.763, not .596.
And this is how markets go from doing really well at one price, to driven into the floor and pinned there by carelessness and well intentioned tools.
One person lists super low in the same moment that I'm going to list 15 units. I hit the load button and trust peak monsters did the right thing and suddenly the going price is cut to 1/4. If it takes a few inutes for my inventory to sell out, someone else will undercut me. Then the people above with hundreds of units will see that their sales stopped and they will come down with everything they have to undercut again and now the listing I was getting 3 for yesterday will be pinned down to .1
And here's the thing, its not because there's too much competition or because the buyer dictated that ooze is only rentable at .1
Renters are actually just fine with renting a creeping ooze at 12 dec and why wouldn't you? It's pivotal. The only thing keeping the price down is carelessness.
In most businesses this stuff doesn't happen because business owners have costs and equipment rentals would cause wear and tear. But here, there are no on going costs or wear and tear so people are careless and don't pay attention to market forces or even what they are doing to take money directly out of their own pockets.
So if you're using peakmonsters to list, please look before you hit submit. If you're posting several units, its a good idea to load up the game and look at the whole market structure rather than just the enxt 5 listings. Sometiems you'll find that you can actually rent it much higher than you thought.
I often find 5 or 6 lowball listings on very active rental cards before the next one up is 2-3x higher. Meaning if I just wait for those 5 listings to sell which might only take a few minutes, mine can be the cheapest one after that and make double or more.
Please look before you leap.
