Business and home land group questions

I have a total of 8,704 sq. m. of mainland land split 5,120 for my business and 3,584 for my home dwelling. This totals to max out my tier at $40 per month. I know that I need to deed the business land to my business group and that it might be advantageous to deed it all to that group to get the 110% advantage where I might even be able to buy another 10% for prim. I've searched these forums for answers so as not to screw myself at some point. Some of the information is available but not in referance to a business that answers my specific questions.

1. Should I deed both lands to the same group to keep the tier at $40? If so what are the exact steps to do this that won't have me accidently drift over some Linden limit and pay a higher tier?

2. What about the vendors I want to get on my land? Do I create a role of "Vendor" in the same group, or should I make them a separate group altogether?

3. I used to work for a group of three land owners who had three groups. The owner's group, the employee's group and the member's group. I'm going to be the only owner of the group or groups, so is any of this necessary? Or should I have a separate group for members while me, my employees and vendors share the first?

4. Do all owners of a group have to have a premium account for that group to own land? I ask this because I wonder if I should create an alt and make her an owner or not.

Thanks so much for your help in advance. All this is keeping me up at night because I'm investing a lot of monety and work into this and I sure don't want to end up loseing it all because I click one stupid wrong box.

You can't accidentally drift over unless you are not paying attention when the buying screen pops up. The basic thing that you seem to understand is that you lose out on buying another 870m2 of land because it's not group deeded. You can deed one part, and then buy 10% above that group's contribution. Or deed both to two different groups, and have extra prim land available for both home and business.
The role is easiest, you shouldn't need a separate group - but that depends on what this group is supposed to do.

The only cognizable reason I can see for that many groups is to distinguish who gets notices. If you do not send notices to a membership, you could get away with only one group.

No. Only the ones donating tier need to be premium to hold mainland.

Two slight advantages to having everything in one group: First, the nasty 25-group limit per avatar. Second, the ability to share prims back and forth between home and business parcels (although that might be a disadvantage, too, if one really wanted to keep those pools separate).

In many cases, a third consideration would be maximizing the total amount of land one can get with that 10% group bonus, but in this case the land is split in such a way that the maximum will be available anyway. Land only comes in 16sqm chunks, so to use that bonus most efficiently, that 10% figure should be a multiple of 16. In this case, the 5120 chunk gets a 512 bonus: a multiple of 16--and an especially convenient one--so the tier bonus is already optimized.

The downside of having just one group would be that any role with permission to do certain stuff on the business side would be able to do the same stuff on the home parcel and vice versa... though I'm not coming up with any ready examples of when that would be a problem.

Groups can be good but I will warn you be certain real certain of your officers before deeding land to groups. I had an officer in my group once that was sabotaging group builds, editing group land and feigning ignorance when we found the club submerged in rock, twice.

They acted, buying land that was discussed at a group meeting before the group could for their own personal land, locking the group land eliminating the only route for expansion then tried extortion like tactics all the while trying to grief us either out of the game or off of the land undetected because of subterfuge.

Finally, once the freaks deception was finally discovered I had to call the Lindens to remove this person as an officer, and quicky as they could have sold our land out from underneath us. Still it didn't stop in fact griefing began on a whole new level.

The Lindens, live help, arbitrators, friends, group members all manipulated in very nasty exchanges because of a lying griefing very disturbed individual. They were bought out of the sim or ran out depending on how you look at it and we thought good riddance.

Guess whose been buying land abuuting our group land once again. All this happend almost two and a half years ago and still this abomination wants to dance more.

Be careful, though not by any means the norm I am not the only one who could relay horror stories in this regard.

At the end of the day the only really reliable resident as a group officer or co-owner is your alt. If you have sunk a substantial amount of money into that operation, it makes sense to limit other people's ability to damage the land to the maximum. Think capability, not intention.

Hint: It also helps to keep an "private griefer" alt handy to test if your group settings are watertight.

Thank you all so much for your replies. What I've done is to make my group and deed all my lands to it. I changed the officer's roles tho and they no longer have any of those powers capable of causeing major grief. Only minor and it's my SL partner so I'm not too concerned.

Does anybody know under the best of conditions what would be the maximum amount of land for one group owner/accounting role?

Not sure there is one if you mean how much can a group own.