How do people afford it

Wow Lindal! That math made my head spin! but i can see where you are coming from lol

/me joins Bradley

I'm gonna leave this one alone.

well sure it would be the same as buying furniture, however if I had that kind of money, I would buy the furniture with it LOL

plus the furniture doesn't have a monthly fee added on

don't forget the tier fees

*shrug*

I just can not look at it as "if I have enough money for this, then I an use it for that" type of view

for me with SL, especially that large of a sum, it HAS to be money I do not have to use for anything else.

and there is never a guarantee that it will make money, or even pay it's self off

a person can have all the confidence in the world and do awesome work, still no guarentee

Yes, she forgot to subtract the tier. However in Des' case, it would be 195 a month, not 295 a month for tier, as most of his sims were purchased before Nov 2006. So out of that 26k a year, you need to subtract 23.4k

Not to sidetrack this thread, but does SL have an awards program?

I'd certainly like to see the great SLers like Mr. Shang receive more recognition for their briliance, vision, art and smarts. I don't necessarily trust Linden Lab to manage a SLoscars award program, but it sure has some positive benefits for them as well as us residents.

Okay, ah, trying to respond here *so embarrassed...* closest thread I'd seen to anything like this was the one that Claire got a couple weeks ago...


The Desmond account was started in March 2005 or so, I think. When I came back to SL in August 2005, I thought I'd just doodle a bit in 3D.

Idea was, I'd get 4096m of mainland. 25 bucks a month... wow, that's 300 USD a year. I figured, if I couldn't somehow support that inworld after the first year, I'd fold up and maybe go back to Lineage2 or something.

I was a Silver Ranger elf in Lineage2. Being sorta solo there I got pwned a lot - a humbling experience. I ah... got disillusioned and kinda became a griefer... ...looks at the ground... if I knew I was toast, I'd round up a lot of monsters and pull a Leroy Jenkins* on entire clans... well you get known for that... okay, so it was time to go back to Second Life

The $L for Caledon was raised by selling little chairs and tables and houses. Much of it $L 50 to $L 100 at a time. Yeap, "the hard way."

26 Feb 2006 it all started. Tier was 195 a month, but it paid for itself and a little more. So I got another region because there was demand for it. Then another. And another. Demand is about the same, even now. My startup was 72 USD for the premium account, and, I paid a month or two on the 4096m West Trade parcel (I think, it's been a long time).

Caledon's tier is now 5980 USD a month for 33 regions (yes, some old tier and voidsims in there but not that many). 71760 USD a year. I've got another 5 regions literally on a drawing board; that will bring it to 7455 USD a month (89460 a year). Then Caledon's done, unless I'm talked into one last set of 4 voidsims.

The 50% occupancy - well, my rates are relatively low compared to some typical regions today, I could easily raise them to par and get breakeven on 50% occupancy unless the market totally collapsed. But who wants to upset people or drive out some very decent but relatively low income students? Not me.

Yes, I do make some money; yes, I do pay taxes on it; yes, it's a lot of time. I'm not all that significant either. My friend Alliez has something like 70 regions now, last I heard.

RE steampunk: As Desmond, no, I didn't invent it in SL. There were steampunk things in SL back in 2003. However, I was around in 2003/4 (different character, Des is an alt) and... did a few things. Few noticed. I don't talk much about my main character, other than he's a landless, broke guy with big dreams wandering the mainland, and sometimes good things happen to people who are nice to him.


* what a "Leroy Jenkins" move is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU

edit: saw I had a date wrong, I'd typed 2004 not 2006 as it shoulda been

Eep, she did.

This is why I have somebody else do my taxes. And why I should have had somebody else check the numbers before I posted them.

Sorry, folks. Adding in tier, these assumptions result in a $5,600 per year loss. We'll have to either charge higher rents, or assume a much lower vacancy rate.

Or better yet, I'll sit down and let Desmond show us some numbers instead.

/me scuttles for the back row.

Don't feel bad. A lot of people think land barons are making a killing. The story of Anshe being a millionaire only helps perpetuate the myth. But the numbers don't lie. The only people making serious cash on land is Linden Lab. You can make a modest profit, but to get to the point where you could live off that profit, you would need an extremely large number of sims. And dare I say, a lot of faith in Second Life.

wow! that is so cool desmond! i know i am like 2 years too late or something lol, but well done! i guess all the hard work kinda pulled off for you. its nice to know what you can achieve if you work for it. oh and if there is a market for it lol.


oh, and leroy jenkins = nutter but soooo funny lol.

You have to figure that for someone starting out NOW, tier is 295/month.

295/ 16 plots = 18.43 USD/plot per month to break even. That is @ 265L/USD, 4886L/MONTH to break even per plot. That is 1222L/wk just to break even per plot. If you assume 50% vacancy and want to stay solvent, you need to double that amount to 2444L/wk to stay solvent with 50% vacancy. Let's call this rent 2450L/wk for a 4096.

Assuming 100% fill (0 Vacancy), you are now staring down 39200L/wk or 156800L/month. This is 591.70 USD, or a little over 100% profit. Assuming you filled up right away and that you paid 1675 for a new island to LL, this is paid for in 5.65 months. And this is WITHOUT selling plots or charging a fee for the privilege of renting there.

If you charged a modest fee in a straight rental situation, you would recover the principal much faster, shaving off a month or more depending on how much the fee is.

edit to add: I forgot the Lindex fee, but the numbers are in the ballpark.

Not to hijack the thread, but thats exactly the conditions I operate under. I bought my first sim just as LL raised the sim tier to $295. I now have 10 sims, and run around a 10% vacancy rate. However my rent is much lower than you cite, expecting 100% profit is a bit unrealistic. My goal is to provide residents with a stable, affordable environment where they can enjoy their Second Life. I could charge more, but the last thing I want to do is put estate living outside the reach of the average resident. I have a highly successful in-world business that makes more than enough profit to take care of incidental expenses. The land is my way of giving back to SL.

Let's do this again. $295 + 3.5% Lindex fee: $305.33
divide by 16 plots: $19.08 USD/plot breakeven, @ 265 L/USD = 5056L/month or 1264L/wk
for 50% level solvency, double that to 2528L/wk. Round up for ease: 2550L/wk.
At 100% the intake is 40800L/wk, or 163200L/mo, which is $615.85 USD.
This is $320.85 USD/mo profit. Assuming $1675 for the island and no fees charged/plots "sold", the island is paid for in 5.22 months.

Hi Darien, I understand, but the assumption is that she wants to break even if the island is half full. The 100% assumption is just the height of what she could potentially earn...Realistically it would probably take 8 or 9 months for this sim to pay for itself, due to lapses in leases. But if one wants to break even at 50% fill, this what one has to charge.

Cool story, Desmond, except for the Desmond-used-to-be-a-griefer part that I'm not sure I believe. TY for posting it!

*gulps*

Ok, I understand now, I was taking it literal rather than theoretical.

Thanks, Darien.

You also have to consider that 2550L/wk is 2.72 L/prim for a 4096. Depending on what market you are appealing to, that could be too much or too little. Mainland sim owners definitely have the edge here, because they can afford to charge much less than that for the same amount of land. But 2.7L/prim isn't bad for waterfront property, of which much of your island is. It's all relative value.

I heard the same - there is also an island where animals are turned into humans - Ummm Moreau? Island of Dr. Moreau?
I only tease.

It's true, I am teh griefer ^.^

Actually here's what happened. In Lineage2 I got pwned with regularity. I simply wasn't clan material... I had issues with kissing up to high school brats.

I don't run any bots on SL, save for Cadroe Murphy's TerrainSculptor ( http://spinmass.blogspot.com/2007/08/terrain-sculptor-maps-sims-and-creates.html ) - but remember in Lineage2 I was *very* disillusioned and frustrated. I started to search for *anything* that would help me. And that's when I was turned on to a bot program called l2walker.exe...

Long story short, you could log in with l2walker and it would keep whacking mobs while you slept. Running it as a background task, you'd have a second character at level 40 in no time. With lots of adena, a few rare items and tons and tons of junk. You had to run the character back into a town once a day.

Please note, back in the Chronicle 1 days this would get you by for a little while, but once you hit about level 58 or so your bot would have *very* few places to hunt effectively without players noticing it and killing it off. So you could get fairly far, but not too far.

Now back to my main, disillusioned, picked-on character. The Leroy Jenkins move was great with a Silver Ranger, but then I discovered the Plainswalker Elf - I'd botted one up to level 40 with l2walker.exe. Fastest elf in the game, which had one *very* key ability. More on that later. I armed him with the equivalent of a wet noodle, dressed him like a noob idiot, and went to the areas where the toughest characters played.

Got to understand that in L2, certain clans would 'take over' good hunting areas. You either joined them, paid tribute, or got killed by them.

Well, here comes my dopey looking elf and a coupla friends I knew who were 'in on it.'

Hulking Leader of large, rude clan in the Giant's Cave: "leave, noobs, before we kill u"

Desmond: "You, sir, need to be more polite."

Hulking Leader: "u are so dead"

Clan Minions: *lolz*

Desmond: "I suggest you don't be so rude, or it may come to fisticuffs, Sir."

Clan Minions: *howls of laughter!*

Hulking Leader: "it's on noob, one hit and you are so ded"

*he approaches with large treasure hunter knife*

Desmond: "Listo, amigos?" ("ready, friends?" I had a couple inworld friends that spoke spanish)

Immediately we run like crazy. I bolt through a huge mob of big white tigers, floaty eyebally things, and various other Lineage2 icky critters. I'd get about 20-30 of them on my tail; my friends stay just out of range of the clan.

Hulking Clan Leader seems to be slow, but I don't really run *off* per se. I'm watched with amazement as I run around like a fool, a zillion monsters following me.

That's when I used the one good skill that the Lineage2 Plainswalker elf had: I ran back to the clan leader and did "fake death." Sometimes they would figure out and try to run away... but I was too fast, and there was always a cliff or ravine or cave wall or something to help corner the murderer-turned-victim. Immediately, all the monsters trailing me jump him - this was in the days before scrolls that could get you out of there fast enough.

"fake death" only lasts so long, but generally the tigers/eyeballs/whatsits would take down not only the clan leader but his cadre of tough guys before they turned on me. Sometimes 3-4 guys would go down really fast, if they were worn down from hunting just prior. Usually I'd live just long enough to pick up some of their stuff. Failing that, that's when my friends darted in as well. We didn't care if we died - we had nothing on us. Usually they just dropped junk when they died, but, not always....

Back in town, imagine the horror when the clan leader realises he just broke his insanely expensive armour 'set' and lame Desmond is wearing his heavily armoured pants... so overloaded by them my elf can barely walk.

I'd sing... "I've got your paaa--aaaants... la la la!"

This was *beyond* infuriating to a clan leader - Never, Ever take a clan leader's pants! It's NOT nice, especially in front of the rest of them...

It was even worse when we would find noobs and give the stuff away. Try talking a low level player out of a gazillion adena piece of armour! There wasn't any real defence against this stunt either, not back in the early days.

I"m leaving character names out due to the fact that my daughter played Lineage2 as well (hoo boy yes someone made the dumb, dumb mistake of killing her character once - they lost the top of a manticore armour set to me, doing that, about 40 minutes later).

But vengeance, even Robin Hood style, really isn't my gig. Lineage2 was fixed up so l2walker bots and lots of stupid tricks didn't work any more. We'd hunt other bots too (so easy!) but I found it kind of boring doing that nonsense, after a while.

And so eventually a noob named Desmond Shang reappeared in SL... it all would have been soooo different had the L2 clans been cool to me... *sniff*...

*bows to Master Desmond, then speaks* Desmond is my friend and we speak often. The huge factor that Desmond has overcome is the vacancy factor. You have to remember in doing calculations that 1) usually not every parcel is occupied and 2) even if they are, are they paying and on time ? Desmond seems to have mastered this problem. I am still honing my approach to it and experimenting. But until I master it, vacancies are my single largest bugaboo. I haven't attempted a community idea yet (like Caledon) but I may in the future. The trick seems to be in having a community so attractive that 1) people don't want to leave their parcels and 2) even if they do, a waiting list takes up the slack immediately. Kudos to you, Desmond.

LOL

Yes and you can bet he has to work to keep things running too with 35 sims full of residents to create drama
And the Steampunk thing, it ires me, I tried to invade Caledon, but my preliminary EMP strike did nothing. Were is an 8yo childlike advisor when you need one,..........

As a resident of Caledon since the 3rd sim, and landholder in 3 more sims there, I can second Jessica. Desmond is someone I can take at his word with utter confidence. A truly fair and honest individual in the business dealings I have had with him. I've done infrastructure builds in two of his sims (SteamSkyCity and Wellsian) and he is quite easy to work for/with. I, as many residents do, consider him a friend. So if anyone is considering Caledon for their home, rest assured dealings with Desmond will be honorable.

I agree. An awful lot of estate owners simply buy a sim, dig some straight channels in it to make a waffle grid of flat parcels, and start selling "tropical island lots." The additional expense of making an attractive themed sim isn't much, but the time investment is considerable...plus you have to have the imagination to come up with a theme that'll be popular.

Those who can pull off this trick, though, will have a big advantage over the hordes of waffle-islands.

I have a good theme in mind - but how do you promote it and get people to come visit for a look see? I would love to have an island with a great sense of community - but I am afraid to hit the "purchase button" so instead am trying to work for others and/or soak up the knowledge.