Why id land so expensive?

I can rent an entire mainland sim to you for $285 as well, thereby saving $10 plus VAT! You really win anyway you look at it.

Lol -That's a much harder challenge....i don't think you'd get it at that price...not even on the East Continents. My gut feeling is that there are not too many whole sims for sale on Mainland....i have a feeling when they are bought at Auctions, they get carved up pretty quickly and sold as smaller plots. Again, I'm guessing here....but if anyone does have a whole Mainland sim to sell...i would expect it to be over a 1000 USD.

Sable, As far as i know we didn't rent the land.. we bought the land. We bought the land and paid tier. now if you ask me.. I think the estate manager was double dipping... selling the land once to the occupant and then again to the new estate owner. collecting twice. now thats a scam if i ever heard one. the new owner didn't even allow us to sell the land(which we own) or honor our remaining monthly tier.

If you weren't paying tier directly to Linden Labs, you were renting. If the estate owner said anything different, they were dissimulating.

Private estate land is *always* rented, no matter what the ad says or whether or not there is an up-front "purchase" fee. The estate owner retains ownership of the entire region, and is responsible for paying the $295 US/month service fee to LL. The only way you can "own" private estate land is to buy an entire region, either directly from LL or in an LL-brokered transfer from an existing owner.

Also, strictly speaking, you did not pay "tier", although it may have been referred to as such. Tier is only paid on mainland, and is always paid directly to LL, in real currency. Rental fees, either on mainland or estate parcels, are generally paid in L$, to the resident who owns the property.

What you describe isn't "double dipping"...a private estate owner can always sell his region to another resident, and the new owner is not bound in any way to honor the contracts of existing tenants. While this is "legal", it is certainly not good business practice...but it can and does happen.

Also note that the "estate owner" and the "estate manager" may be two different people. Owners, especially if they own several regions, hire managers to deal with the day to day problems of tenants. Most managers are quite competent...but it is a good idea to log your chat and IMs. If a conflict develops between you and the manager, it may be necessary to appeal to the estate owner, and logs can help him/her make an informed judgement.

This factor -- the need to rely on the solvency and good faith of the estate owner -- is the biggest drawback to living on a private estate parcel. Choosing your estate owner with care is essential. Estate owners who have been in business for two years or more, or who own ten or more full regions, are likely in it for the long haul and will deal fairly with their tenants, because they know that word of shoddy business practices gets around.

I've lived on both private estate land, and mainland, and enjoyed them both. Some of my favorite places in SL are on private estates, so I am not against them in any way. You just have to do your homework.

That is correct Lindal in fact our former estate owner has been in the business for over 2 years and I have been their tenant during most of that time. Of course it is their right to sale to whomever they choose. What is very hurtful and actually pisses us off is how it went down. SIMPLY PUT. Our monthly payment to the estate owner was certainly made in good faith and it was accepted by them. We even had tp issues on the sim which required them to visit the sim, still not a word from them. Then 2 days later the sim was sold. Thats some funky big BS no matter what anyone says. No they didn't have to give us advance warning but given the relationship what harm would've been to tell us. In fact regardless of the length of the relationship I believe we should've been told. Either we would have made an offer or left. No matter how you cut it we were treated SHABBLY. PERIOD.

We paid a fee to acquire use of the sim and made our monthly payments on time. The sim is an class 4 sim with the grandfathered tier so this individual more than recouped on their initial investment I'm sure long before we moved there. That sim was around when I first moved to my 1028 lot.

Now guess what we have to contend with lost inventory. We got support tickets in for Will, myself and our tenant because when our sim was moved without our prior knowledge over half of our stuff is missing from the sim. If we were told this past Friday or even earlier Saturday we could've packed up everything while it is still there. When our tenant went to the sim to retrieve her items, of course the new owner said they don't know what happened. Funny thing, when Will and I left some of her items were still there.

Although we cannot mention names, I know this person reads the forum. My hope is they read this and treat the next person they do this too with more consideration and dignity than what we got. Oh if you do read this, that guy you said you carefully selected to purchase the sim out of consideration of me. What a joke!!!

Again this is a very bitter pill to swallow.

It's very questionable whether it's legal, but the sums involved won't bring a test case any day soon.

Nope, totally bogus. We've raised the question often about what would happen if for instance we did control 100% of the land in a mainland sim, would that qualify us for estate powers? etc, but no, we certainly don't have them.

We've long been a proponent of better tools to help manage the mainland in general however, (not for 'us' but for everyone who owns mainland property).

Things like telling when a script is broken and lagging a sim badly are taken for granted on islands/estates but if a script on the mainland breaks (and sometimes they do just break, i.e. a normal script thats been running fine for months or even *years* suddenly starts lagging the whole sim down for no aparant reason, until the sim reboots)...

We can't even tell that on our own scripts, for all i know our click to set stream radio (4 lines of code) could have broken this morning, and be using 50% of the sim's script time, and theres pretty much no way i could know as things are now...

It seems to happen a lot on forum rumor mongering... we support an idea (like better mainland controls) and after enough playing the telephone game it comes out the other side 'we got this' etc...

Never happens, if we want something, we want it for the betterment of all of SL, and if its something we don't feel would make SL a better place for everyone involved, we wouldn't ask for it.

Hi Willard -Yes, selling land on Estates is common practice. I would not call it owning as the Estate owner can swipe it anytime....but i would not call it renting either, as by purchasing the land you have the right to sell that land at either a profit or at a loss. I prefer to call it "leasing"....which kind of sits in the middle of ownership and renting terminlogies.


I'm not sure how much you spent on the "purchase fees", i would be very pissed that the Estateowner did not give me some compensation.....very pissed.

Also, if you had your business there...the Estateowner has effectively damaged your business. It can take an age to work your way up the ladder in All search through optimisation...and then all those LM's that have been distributed, or people carrying your Business in their picks.....the short term financial loss in sales to your business could be even bigger than the loss of your "purchase fee".....man would i be pissed, doubley pissed, treblely pissed....man that Estateowner should never log into SL at all, for his own safety!!

Thank you, it was a very respected person who mentioned it (not in these forums I should add), but I couldn't find anyone to confirm or deny it.

I don't think it was anything malicious, its just one of those things that happens on forums etc...

What once was a grain of truth gets buried under a whole pile of misunderstandings and misconceptions and suddenly theres a whole rumor of "thing x omg no way!?"

We have been part of alot of good things for SL over the years, many of which honestly people still don't believe (though many of them can be found if you dig back through the forum archives)... stuff like the categorization of sims vs 'every sim performing the same', yeah, that was us, and an accidental sim crashing object, and a really weird friday night 4-5 years ago.

But no, we live on the mainland, and we are subject to every limitation and headache and problem that anyone else on the mainland is subjected to.

The fact we're still there on the mainland still making it day by day etc says alot more about how stubborn and 'dug in' we are than anything else.

Wasn't Luskwood also behind 9/11, the credit bubble, rising oil prices, Silver Thursday, the war on drugs, US Steel, and the attempt to resurrect Leonardo da Vinci using Tipler Resimulation?

you forgot the killer bees and fire ants

SL does mirror RL in many ways.

what meme is that?
1. order island for 1700usd
2. ll starts dumping mainland at an alarming rate, mainland falls from 10 to 5/m nearly overnight, then continues to slide down in value.
3. ll slashes island price to 1000usd before the island is even delivered.
4. ll offer a 'free' openspace to compensate for the $700 and to keep me from cancelling my order on the spot.
5. ll doubles openspace primcount and halfs the price
6. take a bath on mainland holdings. tier outweighing value its left for ninjabots.
7. ll announce openspace sims arent viable and dictates a 67% tier increase.
8. openspace sim is of no value, cant even give it away, abandon openspace.

so im out 700usd from not having cancelled the island, out an openspace sim, out untold amounts on lost mainland holdings. thats not a 'meme', thats reality. and i am certainly not the only one to have been fleeced by ll in the past year.

Land is expensive because they aren't making any more of it.


O...wait...