OpenSpace Changes -- How do they affect the land market?

Island owners, who could already offer tenants more parcel powers and better estate management tools, can now also offer their tenants the same amount of prims for the same price as a quarter-sim of mainland, but with a lot more privacy, a lot more elbow room, and much prettier, more controllable views. I'm confused -- why aren't the mainland landlords up in arms about this?

anyone who rents from an estate owned island is taking a big financial risk nowadays.

have at it, you island owners. us mainlanders like to live on solid ground and keep our investments "somewhat" secure.

This former Mainland landlord think it's great. Anything that benefits the end user is alright by me.

No reason to be upset that now Estate owners can have ocean you can actually sail on. They still have to pay for the added land. It's not like they are getting a gift.

May those with the best prices, reputations, themes, marketing schemes and customer service win, be it Estate or Mainland.

It's open competition that will eventually hurt the SL landowner when a better product comes along at a better price, not OpenSpace.

I'm seriously considering doing this for my handful of Mainland tenants and myself, actually. I really love the Mainland, but this has huge appeal, especially for my style of building. But I haven't decided to do anything yet; sentimental attachments to the old "home sim," etc.

Personally, I suspect the Mainland auction market will be the first thing to get some downward pressure from this.

Maybe because it's a free market, and anybody can buy anything they want. I'm a landlord on both mainland and an estate. Half of me isn't up in arms about the other half.

Also, mainland is still $25 a month cheaper for the same amount of prims. The price is only the same if all you own is 1/4 of a mainland sim vs. the openspace sim. And this is ignoring the terrible extra $100 albatross around the estate owner's neck for every full island they already own. So my estate operation is still envying the mainland one there too.

To make it fair and really interesting, they need to release openspace sims available to non island owners, $75 for a whole sim sounds great to me, I'm paying that amout anyway for condensed mainland
It just misses the roads and continuity some mainland has

I would buy one without question, and I probably wouldn't even dump my mainland if I did. I've always felt the requirements of being an island owner, and of buying only in groups of 4 were unfair to all. Who's to say a single openspace can't stay on order until 4 orders are made, then brought online together?
I certainly would never rent one from a resident, but I would buy one from LL, and I know tons of others that would too.

You still have to own an island in order to get one, although you need not anchor the sim next to the island. It's a good deal if you want to add on some sailable water and create a community, or offer more private rentals, but you still have to fork over 1675 plus first.

Wonder what happens if you then sell the island off but not the open space sim/s?

I'm betting you can't do that.

Live for estate landlords can become a bit more complicated, if people who rent bigger parcels on their full prim sims now want to switch to a low prim one, getting equal prims but more land for the same price. I think quite a few of the bigger estate owners will buy a couple of the low prims alone to offer their existing customers this choice instead of losing them to another one.

If LL had opened buying of the low prims to everyone this might have been the end to more than a few estate landlords.

Starboards (large sailing club) is already gleefully advertising luxury living on new island communities featuring beautiful views and sailable waters. This is essentially a new type of zone, really ideally suited to low-density residential living.

If the sims are beautiful, people will probably end up paying quite a bit to live there. But will it really impact existing estates very much? I can't imagine people abandoning their current land en masse to move to these sims ...
.

Lots of land per prim has one depressing feature: low green dot density due to less traffic.

So you want to have a mix of regions if you can, or you'll have this vast desolation of emptiness controlled by two or three people. Two or three people and all their friends combined usually mean a really, really quiet area overall.

So I wouldn't worry about openspace regions taking over; the full regions have that extra fun aspect of higher use.

There isn't much downside to offering openspace regions as the Company just has... expect to see a lot of mixed use areas.

I just happened to be debating an openspace sim, so this is good news to me. The lower prim count is what was stopping me.

Problems still exist though... so many estate owners already charge $25 us or more a month for these than from LL, and they also charge ~$100 more to own the island itself. I really don't know what the huge upcharge is, so am debating going on my own. Someone really needs to start offering these at a better rate, and I'm guessing a lot of estate owners are now considering raising rates even more based on the increased prim count.

My guess is there will be little impact. There would probably be more if you could get one without first owning a full regular SIM.

But we're not just talking about open ocean. They can now buy a sim's worth of land for about the same price as a quarter-sim of mainland, and that land is perfectly usable as low-density residental rentals -- and by many standards, a lot more attractive land. Doesn't that give island landlords an automatic advantage over mainland landlords when it comes to prices and themes?


But not at the same price, because estate owners can pay the small set-up and $75/month, and mainlanders have to pay that AND pay the extra thousands to become an estate owner.


I wondered about that... is it just that the most vocal mainland landlords mostly already have an island or two in their pockets, so they aren't really affected?


So the land barons -- who could mostly already offer more controllable views because they control the land around their rentals -- are safe, and it's only the smaller landlords who are about to be put out of business. So we needn't worry about them.


That's depressing?!? For commercial land, sure. For residential, I can't be the only person who'd consider it a huge benefit.

Island landlords have had huge advantage over mainland ones since 2004.

This move is a tiny bump compared to the one that is already there.

Evidence: raising new private regions to 1675 + 295/mo, from 1250 + 195/mo last year didn't really scratch us.


Low traffic is depressing - even for residential. People think it isn't... but it is. It's a 'dead region' effect... people need interaction, even at home, with neighbours.

Sure, people say otherwise - adamantly - and I'm sure some are 100% like that. But I've rented to hundreds... people deeply enjoy modestly active regions. The mouth may say one thing but the wallet says another - and a lot of times the wallet is the more honest speaker of the two

I'd agree that they ought to, but obviously they haven't yet and I originally didn't consider it even a possibility worth wishing for. But a couple of people on SLUniverse suggested that there was a good possibility LL would do this in the future. I don't know what reasons they have for expecting LL to do anything sensible, but it certainly would go a long way toward making premium memberships attractive!

I wonder also if it wouldn't neutralize most of the theoretical danger from open-source sims coming online. In the MUCK world, for instance, sure, you could host one on your own computer at home -- but most people chose instead to use a server hosting company. And the bar for "a better product at a better price" would be a whole heck of a lot higher for an unproven company if LL allowed all premium members to host their own sim on the SL grid.

Well I've just taken the plunge again -- I was contemplating another 4-pack when they made this announcement, and the changes they made have 'sealed the deal' for me. I wasn't quite ready for a 4-pack, but I've put in an order for three of them instead. I'm hoping that the extra prims will make openspace regions even more desirable than ever.

And for what it's worth - I do not charge an upfront sale / key fee, just monthly rental only. No obligation, no committment.

-Atashi

I personally wish I could afford even 75$/month in expendable income. Sadly that's still most of my food budget. But oh wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of room? I dunno.. I'm looking forward to the day when you can buy an openspace sim WITHOUT owning a regular sim.

Maybe I'll be able to afford it by then?

I'm not exactly sure since I don't get invited to the mainland rental ball and dinner but I guess I run one of the biggest mainland rental companies (top 2? top 3? something like that). We have 594,192sqm rented out right now. Yet despite my modest success in mainland rentals I can't justify ponying up for a private island. This announcement brings me pretty close but the numbers still don't quite add up.

There are several reasons but one of the major ones is that no matter how you look at it the costs are 50% higher than for mainland. Now it's just about possible that renters won't mind swallowing that extra cost per prim in order to get 4 times as much space but I dunno. Generally people are interested in how many prims they get not how much space there is.

Add onto that all the other problems with private islands, dealing with bad neighbours, the costs for idle land, inability to own less than a whole sim or get rid of parcels that aren't renting well and I've got a feeling the mainland will be fine for a while yet.

Perhaps I'm just not much of a risk taker and I've been missing out on some great opportunity because absolutely evertyone else and their brother has started a estate rental business at one time or another. Maybe if they offer these void sims for sale individually I'll dip my toe in the water and see how it goes.

Either way I think mainland and mainland rentals are going to be popular for a long time to come.

As a mainland landlord, I don't really worry too much - pound for pound, it is still more expensive than owning a full sim except in the purchase price. Why? Prims and tier. $75 of tier for only 3750 prims is still more expensive than me buying a full 65536 and slicing it in four, 54% more expensive. The rent has to be more expensive and that will shut out a large segment of the market. Having that much land is a luxury. And while there is a luxury market, the amount of people willing to put money into this game hasn't grown, it's shrunk.

3750 is not a lot, and is only good for a small handful of residents. I recently bought and developed about 15k of land and to offer a reasonable prim allotment cut down the amount of units I had on the property to 8. But I also rent boat slip space, which otherwise would have let me fit one more unit on it, at 9. The most you could reasonably get is probably 10-12 units if you do a little landscaping but mostly with Linden trees. That is a fairly empty sim, but lots of sailable water!

Hmm. So it sounds like the answer to my question is that I really am just weird because I prefer elbow room to prims? Given that you can take things in and out of inventory whenever you want, I'd expect that once a certain livable prim limit was reached, maybe 200 or 300 for a small house, that the space and privacy would become more important. But if the experienced landlords say I'm in the minority, I guess I'll have to believe them.

How much space and privacy do you need? All you really need is to be outside of chat distance. It's worth more, yes, but the same effect can be achieved using skyboxes at varying levels over granite. It really depends on how much need you have for community features. As I said, you can stick on a few small rentals on it, but beyond that, it's pretty empty.

No, don't consider yourself weird. Maybe you have better inventory skills than the average person. Most people seem to consider things unrezzed as basically not in their possession. I think those of us who have been landlording for a while have just gotten so used to prims prims prims being the all-important issue, that it's all we really look at when we consider costs. They should call us "Primlords."

I would think one of these open space sims would be great for a club or other high traffic area

You don't need 15,000 prims for a club building, but its great having your own sim for one due to the fact that you'd want a lot of people there.