Tier = land taxes?

Hi again,

I'm enjoying my time in SL immensely and I am taking my time in making the big decisions such as renting or buying land. I rent in a big city RL, so my inclination in SL is to buy land and a home in the country. However, looking at the tier system, it seems that buying only makes sense if you plan on a big business or renting the land out at some point.

Linden speak confuses me. Am I right to equate tier with land taxes or a lease? Since I only want to do a little landscaping and have no plans on a L$ generating business right off, I'm thinking renting makes more economic sense.


I have my 512m rights but it's really just because I thought it only right that I pay something to Linden for using the grid. I would rather rent from a Charity sponsored Sim and put the rest of the money I spend to good use. That's something I really like about SL, that our playing pretend can have at least a little impact for good in RL.


So, what do you think? should I eventually rent or buy?

As always, thanks for all your advice.

there is no "buy".


even if you "buy" a whole sim directly from linden labs you're actually renting.


here's the "three levels of land ownership" in SL:


renting: you pay a monthly, weekly, or dayly "rent" to someone for being able to use a piece of land that that someone owns.
usually, you have to be in a certain group to be able to use the land.
"about land" still shows that someone as the land owner, or more likely that group. you can not make changes to options in "about land".

owning land: you pay "tier" to whoever "owns" the sim that your land is on, that would be linden labs for mainland or some john doe on a private estate.
your name is on "about land", you can change stuff in about land.

owning a sim: you pay "maintenance fee" to linden labs.
your name is on the SECOND TAB of "about land", as "estate owner".
you can not only change anything on "about land" (unless you sold part of the property to someone, see "owning land" above), but you can also change anything on the "estate tools", and you can appoint others to be estate managers.


so... unless you want to really burn some $ and need lots of room, don't go for the 3rd option. you're looking at a monthly bill of 295 us$ there.
Don't let land sharks lead you into believing that you can "buy" a homestead from them, it will be buying the whole land on one, but not the sim itself. you CAN NOT own a homestead/openspace sim without owning a fullsize, and thats where the 295us$ come in again...

renting vs. owning: renting is short term. owning is usually monthly payments, in case of mainland usually at the start of the month. if you dont like the place, its faster / easier to get out of it if you rent.
i

now it's up to you to make heads or tails of this rambling.

There's really four or five levels.

1. You rent an apartment or house in a themed sim. You can't change the build, just the firniture. This is what I did for a while when I started in SL.

2. You rent land on an estate or mainland or "own" land on an estate. You're paying rent to someone other than Linden Labs. They can pull the land out from under you, for any reason. Some landlords/landladies are as stable and reliable as Linden Labs, some are flaky as a cat in a dandruff factory.

3. You "own" land on the mainland. This is still a rent or lease arrangement, but so long as you pay tier you won't get it pulled out from under you.

4. You rent a whole sim from an estate owner. This gets you better management tools, but as far as stability goes it's like #2, as many people found out when homestead prices went up.

5. You "own" an estate. This is similar to owning mainland, as far as stability goes, but you get the better sim level management tools.

Also, if you 'own' mainland land, you have to have a 'premium' account which costs US$72/year, most of which LL pays you back in a weekly L$ stipend.

No matter how you slice it, you're paying somebody every month.. (unless you have just 512m2 of mainland)

Here's a good source of information:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Land_Buying_FAQ

Regardless of the words "own" or "rent" you see connected with "land" in second life, you are really paying for the overhead in running this virtual world.

A map region in SL is actually a complicated database structure, which at any given moment lists up to 15,000 primitive objects located there (called prims for short), plus whatever avatars are there at the time, and all the attached objects *they* are carrying (which can be hundreds or thousands more prims each). They each have names, and you can tell which one you are at by looking at the top of the screen, or clicking the map button.

A program called a "simulator" (sim for short) constantly updates the database as people arrive and leave, move around, add or remove prims, etc. When you arrive, the simulator sends you all the information about stuff that is within your "draw distance", plus chat and other communications.

Several copies of the simulator program run on each server box in one of three (soon to be four) data centers (the normal number is four copies of the program per server). Since there are around 28,000 active map regions, that means there are around 7,000 server boxes.

So, your money goes to pay for operating those servers, the network that talks between it and your computer, the back end databases that store copies of everything ever created in SL, every transaction that occurs, all 16 million accounts and their individual inventories, etc, The people who keep all that running, the people who work on new software updates, and the people who you contact for support.

There are other sources of funds for Linden Labs, like premium account fees, upload fees, and classified ads, but by far the largest is the land fees (tiers) which you pay directly or indirectly when you hold land.

Oh, the reason it's called "tier", is because the fees go in price tiers according to how much land you are using (full, half, quarter, 1/18, 1/16th, etc of a map region). When you exceed the amount of land in one price level, you get bumped up to the next level, then it stays the same until the next level.

Holding 1/128th of a region (512m) costs you $6 a month for a premium account.
Holding a full region on the mainland costs you $195 a month, which works out to $1.52 a month per 512m, so holding large amounts of land is much cheaper per unit area. Therefore a landlord can rent you land for less than it would cost you to buy it, and still make a profit.

Might as well use your 512 allotment. I didn't use mine for two years, what a waste.

You can always find the cheapest 512 you can and just make your home in the sky. There are freebie skyboxes all over SL and all over SL street or whatever the heck it's called now lol.

(And/or) You can rent that out, and use that to rent something somewhere on a theme or charity sim.

Tier is basically paying upkeep to LL for the bandwidth or whatever. It isn't land tax (Europeans have to pay VAT on land holdings) it's upkeep. More like an HOA. ;p

No matter how you go about it, you are paying "rent" or, more accurately, a recurring service fee. There is no actual "ownership" conveyed, regardless of what LL says. The only differences are in the details of whom you are paying "rent" to, how much, how stable they are, and what kind of service you get from them when you have issues.

I would MUCH rather pay 'rent' i.e. tier, to Linden Labs, than lease land, which is what some land barons are actually doing when they offer you to 'buy' land and then pay tier to THEM on an ongoing basis.

For the simple fact that, if that private land holding company folds, you are left with bupkus. Hopefully Linden Labs themselves won't fold any time soon. So in my opinion paying tier to LL is safer.

Now I see nothing wrong in a pure rental (no money up front to 'buy' land) - just keep it low enough that if it does go south suddenly (such as someone selling the sim you're renting on to someone else who won't reimburse you your rent and will kick everyone off the land - yes it happens fairly often) then you won't be hurting too badly.

There are good landlords in SL but there are bad ones, too. Sounds obvious but it doesn't seem so obvious til you lose up to $50 USD on a month's "tier" to them. Ownership my bupkus.

well... i am tempted to start preaching about forced moves to zindra or openspace bait and switch, but i wont.
i will say, however, that linden lab has been the worst landlord ive encountered in sl.

Thank you all so much for the information.

Don't worry, I don't blame any of you for the headache that said information induced.

Oh boy, I think I'll rent and landscape inside my house. I think they call it a greenhouse.

In most cases, are you allowed to landscape immediately outside the rental property? What I mean is a garden or lawn? On protected land, what are my chances of negotiating for such rights?

Oh, From this page: http://secondlife.com/whatis/plans.php I got the impression that I would receive a L$1000 bonus for going Premium. Does anyone else find this page misleading?

If you do lease land from a private land holding group in SL, read their covenant carefully. You are essentially contracting with someone you have never met.

Some of them will keep charging you rent until you resell your parcel, and they mean it. They can sell the sim out from under you, but you can't leave and stop paying rent until you sell your parcel to some other sucker, er, resident.

So it's up to you but those are some things to watch out for.

However, something to look for -- if you are renting in an area where they have created some common use areas, the number of prims that you get will not necessarily be the same for your land size as if you owned that much yourself. If you use those common areas, then no problem, but if not, then you are not really getting your money's worth.

Also, premium accounts get the L$300 per week (more if you are an older premium). That L$300 will offset the actual cost of the premium account such that it really is only about $2.60/mth USD or less (if paid quarterly or yearly). That was based on a rate of L$265 per US$1 and I think right now you get about L$270 or so per US$, so the net cost is even less.

After receiving the L$300 weekly, your "per prim per week" cost will be L$0.61 - L$2.7 for a 512 (depending on whether you pay your premium fee monthly, quarterly, or yearly). Whereas for an entire sim, that cost ranges from L$0.81 - L$0.83 per prim per week. This part was based on a rate of L$263 per US$.

I did calcs on the cost per prim at various land sizes and various membership plans (mth,qtr,yr). I also did the calcs on when it costs less to add a premium account vs increasing your tier level, depending on land size. I'm modifying that one right now based on tier rental vs paying LL money.

If you're not looking for starting a big bussiness of sorts, then all I can say is: don't bother with whole sims unless you're prepared to pay 295USD/month or more for estates, or 195USD/month for mainland I believe.

"Renting" a homestead/homespace for slightly less would be an option as well, though you'd have less prims as well in that case, which means that just some "nice" landscaping is going to cut into your prim budget quite heavily (that is a secondary reason why many people like beaches in their homestead: water hardly needs prims for landscaping, while flat land does.)

Just first decide how much space you want and what your budget is. It might even be an option to sign up 1-3 alts, give all these alts an annual paid membership, maybe with 512 extra tier on each, put them all into one group, donate all their land allowance into the group (you'll get an extra 10% allowance on groupland, by the way) and see how far you get from there. At first glance, this seems an expensive method, but keep in mind that all these alts will get their 300L$/week stipend as well, so it won't be too bad overall.

You've been lucky.

Seriously.

Welcome.



Huh? (I won't blame you for the headache it took to type this then? LOL)



Well read the covenant. Many have proscribed activities, some insist upon a uniform theme to the sim, even on your own property. So make sure you ask the land owner before you rent from them, if your plans are okay.



Not sure what you mean by outside your property. You buy or rent or lease the size of property you buy or rent or lease. You don't get to terraform or redecorate anyone else's other than what you pay for. Unless of course you find someone willing ot pay land price and tier for a sim but let you manage it, or something like that. But I'd be surprised if they still didnt' want to decide how it looked.

In real life would you expect to change the neighboring property? So, no, you can do limited things on a rental which is another reason I recommended a 512 since you get the free tier already. You could put in a garden at ground level, and then live in the sky for instance. Or just get a smallish house on the actual lawn, and put in a garden too.

Protected land is owned by Lindens and it isn't for sale and no resident can change it. The Lindens hold the land to protect the view, usually.

Whoa! Any non-profit that rents land to individuals is perpetrating fraud. Fraud against Linden Lab. Fraud against US taxpayers--LL almost certainly enjoys special tax treatment for its educational and non-profit discounts. And fraud against other SL landowners, whose tier goes to subsidize those discounts.

It's praiseworthy to donate to charity, but "charities" that rent out discounted land are not charities at all. They are scams.

I didn't even know there *were* charity rental sims in SL. Great point, Qie.

As a rule I prefer to donate directly to charities in real life anyway. I have seen too many 'post secrets' about people walking away with the donations given them in SL. Sorry, but it happens. (And I don't fully understand the pressure to donate in SL anyway - isn't publicising a cause and linking to the official website for a charity just as good?)

/me again reminds folks about her charity!

Please give generously!

/me puts up a picture of a kitten!

All proceeds go straight to the charity - no middle men!

/me puts up a picture of a homeless ferrit.

Please give to the Sindy Needs Designer Shoes charity!

So *you're* the one I've seen outside Stiletto Moody with that sign...

being lied to about first land or having my land constantly devalued and reclassified hardly feels lucky!

Sorry, just my way of saying Huh?





I should have said on property outside of house i.e. if lawn or garden are included and changeable by me.

I had a landlord in RL stop me from putting flower boxes in my windows, so I know what you're saying.

I'm seriously considering your cloud suggestion at this point. My little piece of Heaven so to speak.

You better not let Brenda catch you chewing on a pair of shoes.

Oi!!