Bay City Land Value -- Worth L$140/m2?

Well the land is sold with a limited convenat iirc, so by not complying... I think L can simply take the land back and resell it

I'd have to see the tems of the LL sales to be sure, but know many places like that

You have x days to fit the theme or the land is reclaimed with no refund

Are you sure? I thought it was the same old "just follow the ToS" mainland convenant with some sim settings on dividing land/terraforming/prim-bonus.

Yeah, but I think they had some additional rules like the other themed areas.

Hence the sim rules, like i said I'd have to see the auction terms and read the fine print...

Maybe we should AR all the new resellers for Adfarming?

LOL That actually isn't a bad idea.

The spinny "for sell" signs blight the land and the sale prices are rediculous.

The German on the W side of Docklands bought that from the auction winner.
I don't know if that is the only resale so far. Maybe someone is keeping tabs on land ownership in Bay City.

A Euro can buy almost US$1.6
A VAT registered business justifying a stake in SL pays no VAT

Parcel 2J on the W edge of Docklands
Ban Lines.
There is some random glitch I've seen before that makes the lines flash. These lines are doing that for me.

You can see the ugly things even when standing on the pavement/sidewalk on the far side of the road.
FER*****SAKE!!


The parcel is now described as "Triple protected oceanfront double prims!"
That change implies to me that the parcel might be up for resale soon.
Triple Protected??
1. A short alley
2. The road
3. The "ocean" that will be replaced by another Bay City sim in a while.



Whereas the other parcels along that edge (and the road) are cut off abruptly at the sim edge, the owner of this plot has built a Bay City wall along that edge. It masks the 'void' situation very well.

Coming your way when I get in world...anyone else?

Probably something like income tax in the US and all the loopholes....errrrr.....legal deductions for businesses.

I was wondering about that because the first land we rented was sold by our landlord due to being hit by the VAT.

I don't understand the IRS...certainly have no clue how VAT works.

VAT sounds similar to GST, if you have a legitimate business number and declare all your income and expenditure you don't pay GST, but your customers do instead.
So a lot of people upset about VAT may be doing so because they don't want to declare the tax free income they are getting from their SL business.

/me raises her hand..
Me too please!

Gee, I just went and looked. it is very expensive. That freaks me out.
gotta be turning over, over 9 million lindens per region?
how many regions? How many lindens to dollars is that?
It's nearly on par with real life land. Well, not quite but someone will lose, that's for sure.

Don't get left holding the bag as they say.

VAT = Value Added Tax

In its simplest form:

A business buys goods and services from a supplier in the same jurisdiction. The payment to the supplier if the total of the nett goods plus the VAT.
When a business supplies good or services, it in turn applies the VAT on the invoice.

In Ireland, the standard VAT rate is 21%
Say a business buys 100 worth of goods/services in a taxation period. They are invoiced for 100 + 21 = 121
In the same period, they sell 160 nett worth goods/services. They invoice that out at 160 + 33.6
The VAT that they remit to the Revenue at the end of the period is 33.60 - 21.00 = 12.60

Basicaly, they are paying VAT on the Value that they have Added to the goods and services.

If they had bought 160 and sold only 100, they would claim back 12.60 from the Revenue.


When a business sells to a customer in another EU country, it can apply a 0 VAT charge provided that the registered VAT number of that customer is stated on the invoice.

So:
Businesses in the EU can supply their VAT number to LL.
LL then does not apply the VAT charge.

The plot just to the north of me was won by a reseller, and someone bought it from her within 2 hours, for about $670 USD.

Please do. =)

Doesn't always work that way. In the UK, HMRC doesn't consider transactions made entirerly within a virtual world as supplies for VAT purposes. Henceforth, a business cannot claim VAT back for supplies entirely made within Second Life. Some Second Life business are in for a rude awakening when they do their tax returns.

I was referring to RL transactions only, and addressing the question above regarding VAT for European residents in their direct dealings with Linden Lab.

I don't believe that any Euro tax authority would consider transactions internal to a virtual word as real transactions subject to VAT.
Corporation Tax comes into the picture when a business takes real cash (revenue) out of a virtual world.
L$ is not a currency. A business might be wise not to hold a US$ balance within their SL account.
Anyone with revenues flowing out of SL would be well advised to seek professional tax advice.

I think Bay City is a grand experiment, and hopefully my concerns are unjustified - but quite frankly I fear it will be a horror without at least minor covenant enforcement.

Such as: no mainlandy 'for sale' sign spinners, and mandatory to have a building on a parcel. Maybe not well made, maybe not pretty... but *something*. But not a giant turkey leg if you know what I mean.

Land in Caledon's Victoria City still goes for $L 40 to 50 per meter between residents even 18 months after its founding - this is what a reasonably desirable urban area can do.

BUT - the reason it still goes for that, is that aggressive land speculation is *not* allowed. I'd simply refuse to transfer land if anyone got into the gouging business. Thus allowing in the shops, businesses, nonprofits to keep the area compelling. The land originally went for $L 4/m upfront land fees, not even covering the region downpayment.

Since then: about 40% of downtown would have been flattened to 'prim farm' - 2 or 3 lots sacrificed for the sake of a lot of 'for sale' objects on yet another lot. Except that I don't allow prim farming downtown (it's okay outside the city's outer ring road). Which is why Victoria City isn't an obliterated cityscape punctuated with only 4 or 5 nice shops.

* * * * *

This is what it takes to do it right.

Failing that, the least common denominator is going to trash the place.

But the land will stay expensive, because there is always another person thinking that the town is just on the verge of 'being cleaned up' - and like Elanthius was saying, it will be ages before anyone 'chokes on tier'.

I'll leave it to the peanut gallery to determine if I know what I'm talking about.

good post Des, BTW I have always loved the one NCI rule.... the "Dont be a A$$hole rule"

I had been hoping to see comment from you, Desmond, concerning the Bay City (too early to say "Fiasco," perhaps.) I hope LL is reading this thread!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Well, I am about as "peanut gallery" as anyone here gets and I completely agree with you Desmond. Good post as always.

Good post, as always, Desmond.

I'm not sure we'll ever see LL do anything like that, though. They're going to avoid any rules that can't be handled automatically with region/estate settings. Or even just region settings since Bay City is (AFAIK) still on the mainland estate. Anything more means they need to get iteam/gteam people in on it, too.

I very much doubt that LL will devote as much staff time to Bay City as Mr Shang has to Caledon. What I would hope is that they will look at Bay City, though, and how it progresses, and introduce tools which enable both them and other people to manage estates and properties in this manner more easily, by automatically restricting sale frequency, capping sale prices, that sort of thing. I'm sure that landowners could suggest quite a few.

As a paleo-Caledonian I can certainly confirm that if Caledon had had unregulated land sales it would have been the death of it. It would have ended up a brief Victorian flash in the pan, with parcels being flipped and no opportunity for a community to develop organically and attract anyone further.

"Triple protected oceanfront double prims!"

Is that like Double_Secret_Probation ????

Maybe the next owner should build a shabby replica of the Delta House, and across the road, the owner could build Dean Vernon Wormer's mansion How's that for shabby-shiek?

Don't you guys understand? I finally got it.

Bay City is supposed to be a THEMED city. And it is! The theme is ridiculously extravagant houses surrounded by vacant lots, featuring exorbitant prices and garish FOR SALE signs. In this regard, Bay City seems to have been inspired by the rapid real-estate expansion period of eastern and southern Las Vegas, circa 1996-2002 - which, coincidentally, ended right around the time the dirty yellow veneer of urban smog began to descend over the city for the first time since its founding.

I still like the REST of Bay City - the parts that haven't been sold yet. I'll continue to visit those places until they too become blighted. I'll take lots of pictures, and then in, say, two years I'll post a thread where we can all post our pictures and reminisce about how cool Bay City looked before anybody moved in.