Advice re Selling a Large SL Business

Does anyone have any experience regarding the selling of a large SL business. Obviously with the Linden's reluctance to allow avatar transfer, it makes it very hard for proper business transfer too.

Questions I am musing at the moment (and would therefore welcome discussion on) include:

Is it better to sell an item/items full perm to a single person so they have exclusivity on it, or to a few people, or just to as many people as want it - obviously the price would vary depending on which it was? The latter two seem to me to devalue the item significantly anyway.

Is it better to sell off as individual items anyway, or as a full on-going single business?

Should one split a business which sells many different types of products and sell as smaller separate businesses? Especially due to the innabillity to sell the avatar too.

Would a contract, possibly signed by the real life counterparts of the avatars, saying that the original business owner has now relinquished control of the products and promises not to sell them again etc, help a new potential owner feel secure that they really were getting the exclusive rights to the products from then on? (A concern I certainly would have were I on that side of the deal)

Any thoughts, advice would be very much appreciated.

It isn't a question that has never entered my head and it seems to me that SL businesses are worth considerably less that RL businesses. I.e. with an RL business, there's a sort of formula to work out a price - something along the lines nn month profits + stock at value. But the price for an SL business can't really be worked out like that for a number of reasons. The seller could be a rogue and, because the RL value of an SL businesse's profits are almost always very small by comparison to an RL business, the chances of legal action being taken against a rogue seller are much smaller, so the buying price has to reflect that risk.

A seller could be a rogue because, although the buyer receives everything with full perms, there's nothing to stop the seller from coming back and setting up again with the same products. A friend of mine bought an SL business not too long ago and the seller left SL. But he's back now. As far as I know, he has no intention of doing the dirty on my friend, but he could do if he wanted to, and my friend's loss wouldn't be large enough to merit court action - especially when they are both in different countries.

Another rogue possibility is that the seller could sell the business to more than one person, albeit not on the same land.

Another reason why buying an existing business is risky is that LL make sudden changes, and there's no way of knowing if the business will continue for long at its current level of profis. E.g. LL began to compete with in-world businesses when they bought and promoted XStreet. I don't think that in-world businesses were drastically affected but they must have been affected to some degree.

And yet another risk is that sooner or later, SL won't be the only game in town and its population may deteriorate drastically - and, with it, the profits.

So a buyer is really taking a risk when buying an SL business, and the price should reflect it, and not the RL formula of reflecting the profits from the last nn months.

Why are you asking this? I love your stuff, you're not moving on are you

Personally, I'd look for one person to take my stuff, that helps keep exclusiviness, it also adds value to the brand.

It might be worth asking if they'd consider an avatar transfer. There was a thread a while back where somebody was selling a really old lifetime account, apparently legitimately (which was news to me - I thought somebody had to die). An old, established business with lots of stock would seem as legitimate a reason as they had and the worst that would happen is they'd say no.

I just had a nose at your XStreet page ... wow! I'm now saving up for your gypsy caravan, so please don't go!

Contact Honeybear Lilliehook - I know that she once did some negotiating for an established business in SL, but she did not actually buy it. That one was a clothing store and it would have included all of the existing stuff, with the tga files, as well as a few items that had not yet been released.

So ask LL if you can transfer your SL account as part of a business sale before worrying too much about it. LL should get used to the idea people are bailing out. Because they are.