Somewhat New to SL - Group Land Question

Hi folks. Love these forums, they're such a help and there's great community here!

Anyhow, onto my question.

2 friends and I recently joined Second Life (meaning 3 of us, total). Could someone explain to me how group land ownership would work? Meaning, rather than each of us owning a small piece of land randomly around the world, how could the three of us form a group and own a larger piece of land? What are the details of something like this? How would it work?

Advance thanks for your replies!

Clams

Heya Clams! Welcome to Second Life!

Essentially, what you're asking about doing is "Deeding" land to a group.

Groups can own land just like individuals can in Second Life. If you look at the "Land" tab in the properties of your group, you'll notice that there's a location where you can donate a portion, or all of your currently available tier to the group.

The group's Tier allotment is the sum total of all of its members' donations, plus 10%.

Groups can aquire land via one of the officers either "Buying land for Group" (there's a button for that when you buy land) - or an officer can "Deed" land they individually own to the group (The tools to do this are in the About Land window).

If you're with me so far, here's the big downside:

Its a common misconception that when you deed land to the group, you still own it. That's technically false - once you deed land to a group, the *group* owns the land, not you.

Additionally, any one of the officers has the authority to sell the group's land at any time, without the consent from the other officers. Its critical that if you make a group for the purposes of sharing land, that the other officers are ones that you trust.

If at any time one of the group members decides to remove their tier donation from the group, your group may not have enough allocated tier to own your property. If that happens, you'll have to act quickly to replace the missing tier via a donation from another member.

The most common reason folks group land together is to pool tier (and to take advantage of the 10% tier bonus), and to share land permissions (Such as the ability to eject/ban) with the other officers. Just remember that group land is equally owned by all its officers regardless of their contribution - and you'll be fine.

There's more information located on the wiki here.

Hope this helps!

ok but what about this:

if we are intending to use our 512sq.m. First Land lands in this new group, we have to buy our First Land pieces BEFORE we deed the land to the group, right? ANd if thats the case, doesnt that mean that the FIrst Lands we each buy will probably be scatterered all over the place and not next to each other? And thus, how would we deed those already purchased lands to the group and form one chunk of land? I'm confused about how that part works...

Clams

You can use your 512 first land. The plus side also is you can deed parecls to one primary parcel, so while your land size wont increase the amount of prim / object allotment will.

There are many ways to do different things, biggest concern is trust...there are contracts, not so sure how binding they would be since there is zero litmus test against contracts to my knowledge, but I think they would give you a leg or two to stand on if a dispute arises with land. Try to include various sections of SL TOS, like 5.1, though Im not sure if TOS would in fact trump itself with its own by sections. It's worth a shot.

If you have questions you can message me in-world and I'll take a look if you decide to take that approach.

Later.

-Calix