Auctions finally hitting the minimum

I think there is a market for a mix

Some will love the zoned sims, but others will enjoy the freedom of the open sims.

<shameless plug>You can have it both ways, buy or rent an openspace sim from one of the established landlords (like me ) they have the space of a full sim and same prims price and preformance as a 1/4 sim (price give or take the profit the landlord wants to make) there are no neighbours so you have both freedom to do as you want and are free from the blight others might bring, other plus, the more knowedgable landlords will give you estate manager status so you can landscape change settings etc all you want.</shameless plug>

Many people have found the possibility of renting on estates, instead of buying mainland, and that is a sign. For those people, mainland either is no option because they do not want to go premium, or they just don't want the risk of mainland.

My first 2 plots were mainland. Started with a 512, soon moved into a 4000 m2 parcel. Few addfarmers around me that could be blocked with screens, for the rest just plain flat land. Which would now be worth half of the price I bought it for.

After selling it for a good price, I did some land flipping on estates, but disliked that business (though the revenue was higher then my current store!). And now I rent at Ecstacy Realty, an established landlord. No upfront cash, tier is lower then I would pay to Linden Lab, and a good estate managers team. And since I bought the land for the first month rents worth, I have all owner rights that I had on mainland.

Now I always did have commercial parcels, so I don't really mind the neighbours, and even then I cannot see any benefit of buying mainland. Yes, you can find gems on estate land, but you can find then on estate land as well.

My estate land benefits:
- lower rent then Linden tier would be
- better support in emergencies
- no upfront cash needed
- no risk in loosing my investment due to land prices dropping

My risks/disadvantages:
- Ecstacy Realty can pull the plug. Would not loose money, but would loose my parcel (well some money due to lack of sales).

So you see, the choice is not that difficult.

@Desmond: You can put in your calculations that any european has to pay VAT on their tier as well. For me, that would mean 19%. Another advantage for the renting estate land.

One thing that Desmond hasn't mentioned is his gift for creating community...priceless.

True, and that is why he is entitled to charge an upfront sum as well. Might explain the waiting list too

That is the difference between Estates, in my opinion. Someone renting out a plain flat sim, should just rent out, and not expect people to pay upfront. Someone working hard on a themed estate, is entitled to a certain sum upfront. But that is in my opinion People selling waffled 16 x 4096 as tropical islands, and demand 4 linden per m2 for that as upfront payment, will be out of business soon, I guess.

When I see that my rent is about the lowest that can be found in SL, and I do not pay upfront, I would not know why anyone would decide a different path

Dnali: awwww!! Thanks But really and truly I didn't create it; I was honestly more of a bystander - right place, right time. At worst, an enabler.


That may be so, but honestly I can't claim VAT leverage as an advantage. I deal in $L, so where precisely it came from and how it was paid for is utterly out of my hands.

They may have paid VAT when purchasing it, they may not have - they may have earned it inworld, they may have traded it for a level 30 dwarf in World of Warcraft. I have absolutely no way to know.

So yes, a European might find some advantage, much like a United States citizen doing business out of their state and not reporting the due income tax on purchases (few even know how!) but someday the "VAT loophole" could close.

I have no idea what it would take (euro's changing laws? some kind of financial net neutrality?) but I really like the idea of a global, fair playing field. As a Californian however, there's not much I can do about Euro VAT.

Desmond,

No matter how you put it, I am pretty sure that Estate owners benefit from the VAT in Europe, at least if they are US based. Even if your rent equals Linden tier on paper, for example, in reality I have to pay that 19% tax to the Lindens.

So if you charge 40 dollar monthly, and Linden Labs charges 40 dollars monthly tier, I would save about 8 dollars per month by renting in Caledon (or any likewise priced rental). In my eyes that is another advantage of renting over buying mainland.

There's no VAT charged on in-world resident-to-resident transactions.....thats why its beneficial for Europeans to either buy or rent land on a Private Estates.

If Europeans assume Mainland ownership, they have to pay VAT on their monthly tier to LL. They don't have to pay VAT when buying Mainland from another SL resident, but do it its auctioned land by LL and sold in USD (e.g new mainland SIMs or auctioned plots)
Europeans only benefit if they rent land on Mainland when not obliged to
contribute towards landowner tiers (group donations i presume)

Bottom line...any payments made to LL in USD regarding land is vatable including premium subscriptions.

Nothing in your benefits is really specific to rented estate land though, it's just specific to rentals in general and you could get the same benefits on a mainland rental as well.

That's not to say that estate land doesn't have advantages over mainland as well (ability to have the land in your name or a group you own is a rather big one), although mainland rentals could easily undercut (new) private sims.

We know you're the benchmark for this business, Des, but don't forget that large areas of mainland owned by one person can be just as well managed and just as much under a covenant as any estate. Land doesn't have to get sold with a covenant in pieces for it to generate income. There are many themed rental communities on the mainland where the landlord or landlady runs the show. The main difference is that we generally can't own 40 contiguous regions. Maybe that's a huge benefit, but it's way out of my draw distance.

My customers typically can't tell the difference between mainland and estate, or don't care. I've often had people refer to "this island" when talking about my Souteast corner of Nautilus. I've also several times had people that live on my one estate ask me how they can sail or fly over to one of the mainland hotels.



It's possible that you're right, but it's difficult or impossible to verify. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. I see lots of crazy islands that are used for all kinds of crazy reasons. Many of those categories of users, and several of the types of users you cite above are automatically going to be in need of one whole region to themselves, with a known purchase price, preferably in isolation. That has nothing to do with the desirability or cost effectiveness of communities on the mainland. It has everything to do with the very different means by which land is purchased and controlled in SL. How often is an education or corporate manager going to approve a proposal where the pitch starts with "well first I have to bid on this region which could cost $750 but might go as high as $4000."

If you'll allow me to eliminate those odd non-residential-community users to get rid of that skewed result, and only look at your typical cute little avatar placing their furniture in their cute prim house who wants to live in a community, then the numbers might look very different. 4 of out 5 of them might even be on the mainland. How can we know?

--Avion

You are right there indeed, did not even think of that one.

Main reason why I still would prefer Estate, you did already mention: I am owner of the parcel I rent, as far as powers are concerned. Make it show up in Search, set media, landscape, well everything any landowner can.
People just wanting a cheap parcel where they can build their home, might be cheaper on a mainland rental indeed.

(oops, Des has already addressed this )

That can be achieved with mainland too, except you cannot be the owner of the group, your landlord is (so that you can't sell the land from underneath). All the other powers can be granted easily.

I think most mainland landlords, are giving these abbilities these days



i dont see any difference to mainland rentals here too ?


.

I'm not sure we can know.

I've heard that as much as 30% of the entire grid is used for education, and I think the overwhelming percentage of that is private. Same for corporate.

Let's run a 'back of the envelope' estimate:

"20,000 regions on the grid, 16k private, 4k mainland"

Not on the money, but close.

Say of that 16k private estates, 30% are educational institutions. Call another 20% corporate use - just a guess, but basically you are at 50% right there.

Alright, 8000 private regions left. How many are stores? Let's make another really horrendous assumption, and presume half the land is used native inworld personal businesses (nonrented) and the other half, rented out.

So that's maybe 4000 regions.

How many of these are rented, and how many straight-out 'owned', mainland style and used for personal use?

Well, let's see. Anshe's got something like 500 regions. Adam has a few hundred I think. Dana and Alliez have about 100. There's maybe 1000 right there. People like me, and a whooole bunch of others have on the order of 50 or so - I'd say easily more than twenty of us like that, so there's another 1000.

So of private estate rental regions, it's likely more than 2000, but also likely to be less than 4000.

Compare that to 4000 regions of Mainland - in terms of people just 'playing house' it comes out maybe roughly the same. Because of course there are a lot of other things going on, on the mainland too.

That would be my best guess of the situation, detailed out as best I can.

* * * * *

Mainland rentals I don't see fundamentally different from private estates at all, except of course for the really super-premium stuff that most can live without:

- events of more than 40 people per region (or region corners: 160 vs 400),

- estate access granted to openspace users,

- no adfarms or performance-killing stuff
(adjoining regions DO affect your experience, if you see it you had to load it)

- group or personally deeded land

- ability for the estate to brand itself easily, expand logically (i.e. stay in biz)

Few of those are big concerns for someone with 1024 square meters.

* * * * *

The only subtle point is the one Elanthius raised in the beginning, in a way: what is beyond your draw distance *does* matter. A lot. I can't even begin to say how incredibly much.

Caledon doesn't fit in anyone's draw distance (even if you force RenderFarClip to 2048m) - the same for Bay City, the same for the elven regions, the same for any large place with a cohesive identity.

If it didn't matter what was outside your draw distance, that region that went for minimum bid should have gone for about as much as one next to Bay City.

In fact, if someone bought that low-bid region and put some canals and streets there, they would have 'Bay City' as far as anyone with 128m of draw distance was concerned. But we all know that won't happen - nobody is going to sell 1024m lots for over $L 100,000 on some random region on the mainland.

Besides the very valid point that it matters what's beyond draw distance, a buyer of Mainland sims doesn't have the ability to terraform at will, so that's another important distinction: a full-sim owner on Mainland can't make Linden water canals in the middle of the continent.

All I know is that I love to build things, and derive great pleasure from people paying me rent to live in them. And business is good. If what lay beyond my sim boundaries were so vitally important, I wouldn't have any tenants. Maybe people that do care just don't live in my communities and go get on the Caledon waiting list.

...which is fine, because I think there are enough types of customers for all types of businesses, and I'm not sure why it's so important to try to prove whether estates or mainland are "better."

I don't care to argue about it, but I'm going to defend against what I see as mainland-bashing, because it's hard enough to win customers without them coming in here and reading that my business is automatically some kind of sinking ship just because it's mainland.

And Nautilus and Corsica are all class 5 sims. Don't class 5 sims support 100 avatars? I've never tried, but I'm willing to build a prim phone booth, send out the invitations, and test it.

Oh, for that matter I'm probably going to do a one region Caledon mainland area myself someday - a large arcology. There's definitely a place for mainland stuff, no question.

It's one of those 'you got your peanut butter in my chocolate' kinds of things... there's constant private estate bashing too, and as the old Soviet expression goes: 'silence means agreement.' I don't agree that all private estates are bad, obviously, hence my replies.

Oh, yeah and Qie is right, I forgot about the +/- 4m mainland terraforming thing. Though there is a good bit of mainland right near water level in Heterocetera - one full region there could be nicely cut into canals or what-have you. Certainly a lot of mainland regions could be little cities.

Class 5 regions - this has notthing to do with the avatar limit. As I understand it all the mainland regions are set to 40, though any region can be set from 1 to 100 or something like that. You can call up the estate controls, and even on mainland where you can't control it, it should say. No need for a test. World, Region/Estate, first tab I believe.

As for why areas do okay - honestly, if you have a cool popular area, it almost doesn't matter what else is going on around you. Check out The Wastelands - something like a dozen regions of postnuclear sand. Yep, not exactly Martha Stewart territory there. Shattered freeways, broken glass, great community!

And people are what really seems to make all the difference.

Yes, that would definitely be cool. My newest hotel, opening soon in Clonmel, is sort of like an arcology, if you could have built one in the 16th century. At any rate, it's one building that takes up nearly the whole sim. Fun yet time-consuming stuff.



Ah hah! I'll have to look. I could have sworn I didn't have that tab except when I was pulling up the land menu on my estate land, but I definitely could have missed it.



Yes, I agree on all counts on the above! Thanks for all your insights, Des. Please don't mind me getting snippy defending my mainland like a mother bear.

--Avion

Well if renting on mainland has indeed the same possibilities as Estate (meaning the land ownership tools) then I withdraw my postings about Estate benefits. If indeed the only difference is that I would not be the owner of the group the land is set to, I couldn't care less.

Might even go further then admitting I was wrong, depending on where the mainland sim is located: for business purposes a mainland rental might even be better. More passing by traffic I guess. And the price could be even lower as what I pay now since tier is 33% lower. But to be honest I never thought about renting mainland for my shop, just a lack of knowledge probably.

Mainland does have it's attractions, one of the biggest of them is the fact that the sims are connected. So one could travel almost endlessly without having to TP.
The main issue against that same mainland, in my opinion, is the fact that it is not regulated in any way. Good for some people, but still the cause of so many eyesores (addfarms, extortion builds, banlines). For my business I couldn't care less wether my neighbours building is an eyesore, but I can imagine that for residential plots it is a big issue.

With the current mainland pricing, I would prefer buying mainland Sim over Estate myself. Do some basic landscaping, and rent out the parts I do not need. With tier being 100 dollars lower, this should work I guess.

Thanks for the insights people I stay with my statement that I prefer renting (from an established landlord) over buying, but after your arguments I would say that the renting can be on either mainland or estate!

The only right answer is what works for you. Caledon wouldn't work on the mainland for several reasons including the inability to expand, but the City of Liome wouldn't be successful on an estate because the high costs would ruin the business model. Des's model depends on location, whereas I couldn't care less about my coordinates for that project. Both are successful where they are. There's really no need to withdraw your opinions. As long as we can express how either type of ownership meets or doesn't meet our own needs, instead of talking in absolutes that must be true for everyone, then the statements are no longer bogus, and nobody feels insulted or feels a need to prove the statement wrong.

And back to sims costing $752. WTF? The auction page wasn't broken was it?

I'm no accountant, but a few months ago, around the time of the ad-farm ban I believe, sims were still winning actions for $4000 US. So although LL gets their tier either way, do they really not care that they are losing over 3K in initial purchases because they are releasing too much land?

Are they also not concerned that if SL turns into a Dyson Sphere, where the population is spread so thin that it's hard to find anybody at all, that most communities and business won't really function at all under those conditions? Without an effort to increase the population along with the increase in land mass, I don't see how this is sustainable.

Depending upon your circumstances, that's quite a big difference. You can immediately use the land and not have to wait around for an invite, you don't have to have another group taking up your group limit and you can use that space for something more of interest to you.

From the landlord point of view, such a setup means forced prim limits. Tenants might not immediately think much of that but if you're in group land and someone else is abusing the prim limit then it can be a pain, yes the landlord deals with it but it's something that shouldn't happen on estate land at all.

There are of course other subtle differences that with the best will in the world, a lot of mainland sims can't provide, such as dealing with troublesome neighbours.

However in general, as most people behave themselves, the differences between mainland and estate rentals aren't that great. If your landlord is concierge level, they will have access to concierge support, which is an excellent service most of the time.

Remember the buzz when Permutate closed at US$5501 ?

Admittedly, that mainland sim is an island with protected water sims on three edges and three corners - but it's still a far better buy than a bit of Bay City.

the reason landprices have fallen so much is that second life has not worked for more then 12 hours in a row in the past 2 months.

im glad i got out when i did with my profit