Go from Mainland to estate

Hello i'm going at the moment from mainland and payment to lindenlabs to an estate land rent. I had always a premier account but now i don't have any mainland anymore can i drop the premier account and go to basic account again to save some money? And can i hold that estate land without premier account rights. I thought i can and i read at at a few website but i'm not 100% sure. What are the + and what are the - to do this or make it not diffrents at all?

Greetz

Nixon Mills

You might miss your stipend

Lol yes i will mis that ^^

Yes, you can have land on Private Islands without ever paying for Premium account membership. And though dropping the Premium account means you'll no longer get the weekly stipend, consider this - What you paid for that Premium account was, most likely, more than the combined value of a years worth of those "free weekly stipend payments". In other words, if you spend the same amount of money buying L$ on Lindex as you used to spend on the Premium Membership annual dues, you'll get more L$ than you would have accumulated in Stipend payments over the year. The only exception to that is if you were Premium prior to mid 2006, when the weekly stipend payment was still L$500. If you were, and if you paid annual dues, then the years worth of stipend payments comes out to a few dollars more than what the membership cost you. Which is why they dropped the stipend to L$400 and later to L$300 a week on more recent Premium accounts.

Also, once you drop Premium membership, you get less support from the Support system - which LL does poorly anyway, so that is no great loss.

If you change your mind and become Premium again, I think I read that the stipend on the new membership will be at the new, lower rate.

Ok thanks for the info. Of course i considerd those price questions earlier. It was more that i not lose my already rented estate lands wenn i downgrade.

The positives are:



+ you can consider yourself Elite by not having to deal with Peasant Mainland Scum

+ you can claim that you are getting a great deal by getting a prim bonus.

+ You can surround yourself with people that have virtually identical looking houses and themed builds - good for roleplay.

The negatives are:

- When you "buy" on an estate you never get anything, any money paid is pure rent. The estate owner always owns the estate and if you get evicted or the Land Owner quits you are screwed without recourse.

An estate costs 100 Dollars more per month to rent from LL than Mainland so your Rents will be a lot higher than on mainland.

- Estates have rules tha sometimes prohibit you from building certain items or as I have seen prohibit building at all.

- Some estates are not actually estates they are a stripped down Bargain Product that restricts the number of AV's and Scripts as well. ( If the entire sim is ony 3750 Prims it is not a full estate - it was designed to add a forest or more ocean to a full priced sim, yet people rent them out as if they were the real deal.)


- There is no such thing as free prims, you get charged for using the prims even if there is a "bonus" its just a fancy sharing system that gets twisted into making you believe you are getting more prims for your money. You pay full price + - I have seen where tenants on a sim cannot rez any items because every tenant on the sim is using some of their prim bonus and once the sim fills up nobody gets to rez another thing until somebody else deletes some.

And you can surround yourself with people who have quite different houses, but all within the same style, knowing with confidence that the estate owner won't permit any businesses, ugly barriers, or similar blights.

When you buy on mainland, you never get anything, any money paid is also pure rent. LL always owns the sim, and if you get banned, a club moves next door, or LL changes the rules unilaterally, you are screwed without recourse. Just ask the people who've been denied free exchanges to Zindra.


Estates have rules that sometimes prohibit your neighbors from building certain items that would devalue your property.

Seriously, there are more pluses and minuses to both than you listed. Perhaps the biggest minus of buying from a private sim owner is the difficulty of doing the research to check their reputation, but there are many reliable estate owners who do a better job of managing their estates than LL manages mainland. And yes, there's a bit more learning curve to understand prim allocations and eventually script limits.

I'm no zealot for the free market, but this is one case where I believe the free market does a good job of measuring the relative value of land. Just do your homework, ignore the outliers, and keep an eye on LL policy changes that disrupt prices.

It's a disservice to post one-sided statements about the pros and cons, at least without some sort of disclaimer. To practice what I preach, I can't say that the above is an exhaustive list, but I'm sure other people will fill in anything that's missing.

It depends upon what plan you're on, if you're paying 9.95 a month on a L$300 stipend and own a 4096 the difference between estate and mainland is likely to be very little, estate land can work out cheaper than mainland.

Even with a yearly membership the difference could be very little, about twenty bucks a year which even at today's cheap prices in the first year wouldn't buy you a 4096M parcel on mainland.

I already tryed 2 months on a estate right now before i sold my mainland. It is working good and for me it's cheaper. If the owner of the estate quits now that's my only real problem but not a realy major problem i will make my shop again. I only have 13000m2 at the estate now for +/- 18k a month. No creditcard, or further payments needed. At lindenlabs i payed i though almost 50$ a month for 8000m2. I'm not an american so i most pay 2 euro a month for creditcard and 1 euro more becuase i'm not an american. so almost 55$ a month. So this is cheaper for me. The estate owner "reality moller" helpt me good this 2 months so i have the trust that everything will be ok. Thanks again everybody for the good answers to my question.

Here's a rundown of the 'real cost' US wise, of a premium account(s):

9.95 monthly
7.50 a month if quarterly
6.00 a month if annual.

For that you -get- 300L a week.

Math time:
300x52 = 15600L a year. 15600 / 12 = 1300L a month. 1300L costs roughly $5.

So the real cost to buy premium is:
4.95 monthly
3.50 if quarterly
1.00 if annual.

For that you get a 512 plot of mature land (or PG if you're into limits) and 117 prims. You get an additional 10% (51m) if you put yourself into a group of 1 and deed your plot to your group. That will give you more prims if you merge that plot with your 512 - but that takes buying a lucky location.

The cost of that plot in lindens is therefore:

1282L / month if monthly
906L / month if quarterly
259L / month if annual

Add to this then the cost of actually buying the plot. Market conditions vary, but at the time of me writing this, its about 1.7L per square meter.

- I do not know how that compares to renting on a private sim or subletting on mainland.

Don't forget that you may also get to enjoy enforced periodic relocation as the estate owner consolidates holdings to maximise profits/minimise losses and that in no way will the moves be equivalent necessarily except in terms or prims/land size. That view you loved over the ocean on your beach land may now be hilly green and landlocked.

It is even worse if you get an unethical estate owner too...

Gee, sounds exactly like the shaft that Mainland owners got from Linden Lab, when LL redefined the rules on Adult Content, making Mature land almost worthless, and forcing Adult Business owners to relocate.

Except it happens on an almost daily basis with some estates and has been for some time now.

Estates can and will do this as often as they desire.

Mainland has done it how many times? Once? And they're giving people several months to get it done, with some room for choice over where they land, and a lot of debate over the terms of the new divide. Sure, from our end that debate has been pretty one-sided, but it happened, and they have done discussions with people about it.

Estates on the other hand need provide no rational or explanation, no time to move, no choice on where you land, nor even let you stay at all.
- Everything in renting from an estate is about human contacts between you and the landlord. Managing that interpersonal relationship is the entire sum of your protection over your investment.

Linden on the other hand, while they do seem to have some bias from time to time, is generally faceless and doesn't give a hoot who you are or how much brown-nosing you do. As long as you stay within rather vaguely defined general terms its a hands off relationship in both directions - they leave you alone, and you have a heck of a time getting their attention.

Lindens -have- changed those terms you have to adhere to, but it is not a frequent occurrence, and it is not done on a short 'imperial whim.'
- And unless you are dealing in -commercial- porn or gore the terms haven't changed.

Not all estates act irresponsibly.

In fact, some absorbed things like the entire 75/month -> 95/month rate hike, and still do to this very day at a cost of about 5000 USD annually across the board.

And use their concierge access to do all manner of things, such as call in at 2am to get an issue taken care of, on the spot, having nothing to do with their direct estate business. Regularly. Just because, and no questions asked.

Something to think about.

Nope, no one is saying they do either, nobody is talking even about estates that are considered irresponsible generally.

It is the responsible estates of which some have the best of reputations that are doing these kinds of moves too and they consider it necessary to survive/make profit. Just it is often stated giving no refunds is also necessary to survive etc.

It maybe necessary in the estate holders eyes but as a new renter I would sure as hell want to know about it before renting.

No, not just because, because it makes sense for them to do so or to fulfill a promised period of rental paid for in advance. Nobody is eating costs just for goodwill, maybe to keep a reputation where it is perceived it could otherwise be damaged, but not just goodwill.

Sure, it is good customer service to go above and beyond when you can. That also makes good business sense, it is not due to some altruistic feeling generally.

Do you really think this is limited to only estate rentals either?

Actually, you are talking about estate owners acting irresponsibly ~ most estate owners I know try *very* hard to make residents come out on the 'plus side' if there is any turbulence. It's stupid to screw people over, even a little bit ~ they pick up on that and don't stay.

Nor have I implied 'good will' was a factor for low rates... where is this coming from?

I never made any such claim, so asking me if I 'really think' that is mystifying.

Actually... never mind. I'm not keen on delving into all this.

I just tire of generalisations about how hard people are knocked around on good estates that "are doing these kinds of moves too." We aren't.

The fact that you think it is irresponsible is to your credit, I assure you that I have seen chat logs and seen friends having to move partial builds due to this problem and some of the most responsible estate owners by reputation are doing these kinds of moves, stating to the affected person(s) that there is nothing they can do about it, it is necessary to consolidate their holdings as I said. What they tell you is their policy may be a lot different to what they actually do, or it might be that we are talking about two different groups of people.
First time estate renters are not going to know the difference though.

You seemed to me to be making the claim that estates offering rentals will (with the inference that mainland rentals won't) do the things you listed. If I read that wrongly then I apologise, that is where my "really think" came from. I probably just read it that way.

Yeah I get tired of generalisations about mainland too, though in those cases the accusations are mostly false. It is not as is I can go into specifics here can I? So my testimony must be about generalisations and I did say *some*, not all.
I don't really care if you believe my testimony but if you are calling me a liar, I have an issue with that. If you are saying that you may not know what *some* other estates are getting up to then fine - I can accept that.

So you expect that an estate owner should just keep on losing and losing money so as to NEVER have to move anyone? To me, that would be irresponsible, as it increases the likelihood of a business entirely and the residents logging on one day to find that the sim was shut off by LL for non-payment.

I have had to move people before, during the Openspace crisis and once to re-theme an underperforming sim. I gave them plenty of notice, refunded remaining tier, and even offered a free week of rent on any other sim. No one got angry, people were very understanding - and nearly all of them chose to remain with me. Sometimes I think that people confuse SL land with RL land. Things change in SL, nothing is permanent, and land is not really land and it's not really owned. It is rented server space. That does NOT make it ok for estate owners or LL to screw over their customers, but if proper notice is given, comparable replacement land is offered, and tiers are transferred or refunded, it seems perfectly responsible to me.

If anyone is to be blamed for estates closing or consolidating, blame LL's private sim tiers. If a sim isn't 75% full at typical rental rates, it loses money. Those are not fun profit margins to work with. Trust me. If they dropped it back to $195/month, sims would only have to be half full to break even and estates would be much more stable.

I don't expect anything, however it does mean that on estate land you are more likely to be moved to another piece of land, land that is not as nice, which is not what renters are expecting when they go rent estate, hence making it often riskier to rent estate than it is told, in my opinion.

This generally does not happen on mainland with tier to LL, though as someone pointed out the recent Zindra move is kinda like that, though the chance of it happening on LL land generally is far lower than estate.
That was the whole and entire point of this conversation, one that Desmond denied was happening. Thank you for coming and showing that it does happen even with reputable estate owners such as yourself Ayesha.

I was not blaming anyone particularly, just saying that the practice happens and not everyone in all cases are happy about it. It is to your credit that you only did it because you could not avoid it and yet took the care you did over it and were able to do this and retain happy customers. I have had friends who were not so happy with their moves from some estates and seen chat logs where others who are also considered reputable didn't give a lot of notice or even try to give equivalent land.

Well I'm sure people will be being moved on estates when the adult content policy kicks in fully and that's not really the fault of estate owners, but to make things work there will need to be changes made.

I've been moved on estate land and I ended up with a better deal so swings and roundabouts I guess.

She was only trying to warn the guy. Sheesh.

the claims that moves on mainland don't happen as often as on estates is not very true, the reason for the move is just different, people have to move on mainland because the sim they are in has become useless after a club has moved in or some ****head put an ugly particle fountain on a small plot in the middle of the sim and being mainland the only way to get out of that situation is dump the land and get new land somewhere else, and yes I mean dump because nobody will give much for your land in an ugly or laggy sim.

That is not the same thing at all, a person still has the choice to ride it out (and many do - I know I have) or try to get LL to do something about it. Even with bad neighbours, your land is still the same land with the same topology you got it at, nobody can change that but you. You don't get moved from your parcel on a full sim to a homestead parcel either like one friend of mine did.

Thanks Melita, people seem to be quite touchy about this and yet a lot of estate owners are only too ready to point out the problems with mainland to anyone who will listen.