Maybe the term "for sale" has changed over the years

what you are buying is the "privilege" of renting from them.

edit> sorry kitty

It is another term used to mislead the innocent, in case they might otherwise see-through the word "Buy."

Seriously, I couldn't imagine a word more freighted with apparent legal connotations to describe something so utterly meaningless. Instead of "covenant," I'd recommend "list of excuses we've thought of in advance for kicking you off anytime we damned well please." This does nothing but damage the business of reputable Estate owners to the benefit of the short-change artists.

It's as if we scripters lobbied to have the PERMISSION_DEBIT dialog changed to a cheerful green color, labeled "Press this button for free L$s!"

Because a sim owner isn't an entity that exists separate from LL. If sim owners were entirely independent then you would have a point.

LL is the ultimate "authority" and if they don't recognize your claim over land, you simply don't own it. If a sim owner tells you that you do, there's nothing in the way SL works to back that up, nor is there a RL precedent that would assure you that that's actually the case.

You'd always have to trust LL though.

If you (in the general sense) believe that LL will randomly evict/ban people without cause, then there's no reason why it couldn't happen to the estate owner you're renting from and you'd still loose the land.

No, anything less that FULL TRANSFER is renting or leasing. You still going through a middle man. Full ownership is buying as you are paying the government taxes (in this case Linden Lab), not some middle man renter who hikes the tier price for a profit.

There's nothing stopping you from entering into a written RL agreement with an estate owner. I expect that most will refuse, because they want to preserve their anonymity, but there's one very large landowner who isn't anonymous at all. Perhaps some others will view this as a business opportunity.

The only thing stopping you from trying to enforce an estate covenant, from the renter/parcel buyer side, is the difficulty of finding the RL estate owner and suing in whatever jurisdiction may apply (which could be a different country entirely).

For a while, I did seriously consider getting into the rental buisness. Until the VAT thing stopped any chance of that - grr, I am in Britain.

My intentions were to try and do things a little differently to most. Because I would personally be very, very wary at trusting an estate owner, I knew I would have to establish a lot of trust. Apart from the fact that I am a 2004 avatar with an established business and can provide a good few prominent residents as references, I wanted to show potential renters that they had reason to trust me.

Therefore I intended to :
a) give my renters my real life contact details - that way I am accountable to them
b) be prepared to speak to them on Skype, webcam, mobile phone, landline - I have nothing to hide
c) Offer a written version of the covenant in advance. If it were emailed or sent by post then they have a copy and know that I am not going to change it on a whim etc

Do any estate owners do any of these things already? Would renters/leasers/whatever you want to call them consider them as good things to do?

As it stands it seems to me that renting estate land should be a wonderful way for people to have nice locations to live or trade. Sadly,what I am seeing instead is story after story of people who have lost money, lost the home they love or lost heart inSL altogether.

I think if they separated it after defining the term, it would make search much easier. It's very simple. to buy is to own. If you buy an estate land, you should be the new estate OWNER, not manager. If you are only the manager, then you ar4e leasing, not buying.