How do I know??

NO LONGER RELEVANT

In the covenant tab, see if there is an estate owner listed. Mainland will just say "none)" (but so might private regions if the servers are slow).

Ah Thanks for that. I look more closely

There is covenanted land on the mainland though. If there is a covenant _at all_ you are renting rather than buying from SL, so be careful.

Also, when using Search to look at plots, there is a tab that lets you select For Sale: Mainland. Then all your results will be sorted for you. Can also filter out Mainland and just search Estates.

How do you add a covenant to mainland? I thought this was only available in the estate management tools.

Or do you just mean a rental agreement, as opposed to text actually in the covenant field in the About Land window?

I just open up the map.. There are only 4 mainland continents and they're ginormous - if you're on one, it's usually pretty clear.

People have been saying this a lot recently, but it's misleading.

You're always renting. Period. If you don't pay your tier to LL, they'll take back your parcel. If you violate the ToS, they can terminate your account, which has the same effect. They can take away your casino equipment, or limit your parcel to people whose ages have been verified.

In both cases, you aren't buying anything tangible. You're getting a short-term, renewable, limited license to use a computer service in a particular way.

There are important distinctions. First, whatever the contract for the license may be, it will be more straightforward to enforce that contract against LL then against some anonymous estate owner. Second, it's much easier to find out about LL's reputation as a seller than some random estate owner. Third, when you buy from an estate owner, you have the risk both of the LL going under and of the estate owner going under or defaulting on their payments to LL.

In other words, the risks are different. Not necessarily greater, just different. But saying that you're buying from LL but only renting from an estate owner does a disservice to those estate owners who are reputatble.

Semantics. As you stated, estate living has all the risks of owning mainland PLUS the added risk of the middleman you are renting from.

The only ways a person ever loses his mainland is if it's group owned and the group disbands, if they don't pay their tier fees and if they do something that gets them banned. You can lose your estate land for any reason under the sun.

I still think estate living is a great, viable way to go. Just make sure it's an established Estate owner with a stellar rep that you are going with.

I get the whole thing about I am actually buying a computer service with a variable monthly rate based on my usage etc.. I use the accepted terminolgy here of buying / renting / mainland / islands / private etc... so we all understand what feature I am talking about.

When I read horror stories about people paying rent one day and kicked out the next. Or griefers allowed by private sim owners to harrass people. You can understand my apprehension about buying private land. I haven't seen any place where Sim owners are rated by thier guests. If a SIM owner did have a bad rep.. couldn't he just transfer his property to an unrated alt and start again? At least with Mainland I am dealing directly with LL.

Will I own private land? Yes perhaps some day and with a bunch of research. Some day I may become a middle man and own a sim myself.

Thanks again for all the responses. "G"

Actually, the estate owner is Governor Linden. One easy way to know is to zoom out and if your sim is on one of the 6 major land masses, it's mainland.

I recently lost my shop because the estate owner wanted to turn the region into a combat region. Now I really want mainland so it doesn't happen again.

On the other hand, if there's a problem with the sim, I understand it can be hard to get Linden to do anything about it if it's mainland. On an estate, I guess you just have to be sure the owner cares about the tenants.

Long time ago, in the days when Anshe started her empire, LL let private islands pop up rather close to the mainland. A few of them have still to be moved off the mainland grid and are located a square or two away from the continent. An example is Cayman Island.

So you are saying that Cayman Island is a private island owned by Anshe, but that it will show up in a land search limited to mainland?

Even so, that would simply be a bug, not an actual example of a mainland sim having a covenant, right?