Real Estate Agents

After a bad experience in the last week i would like to know how many of my fellow residents have been ripped off or badly treated by Real Estate Agents.Some of these agents seem to be a law onto themselves knowing full well they can do as they please and know they are free from any reopcussions from Linden Lab.Most of these Agents own huge amounts of sl and they seem untouchable.Its time us the little person in sl take charge and bring these dishonest dealers to justice.my personal experience was to buy/ rent a homestead from an agent for 4 weeks with the intention of staying long term,something i told him when negotiating.The next day his security personel dressed in their police uniforms came to me telling me i could not do what i wanted to do on their land and my building contravined their covenant.This covenant was not there the day i rented and was put there while i argued my case with them.All i asked was for my money back and i would happily move on to which they threw their rules and conditions of sale at me and refused to pay me back. i even told them i would take only 3 of the 4 weeks they owed me just to be rid of their arrogance .to this again they refused.I sent abuse reports and tickets and to no avail and since then the agent has refused to answer my note cards or im's and he has revoked my estate managers rights and even took my property off sale and has prevented me from selling it.I wont name this person in public chat but i will gladly pass his name in im to anyone who asks

Wow, sorry all that happened to you

Sadly you are totally SOL as far as LL are concerned as they will not get involved in resident to resident disputes. If you were renting the whole homestead, apart from being sensible in what you put there bearing in mind its a shared server, why did it even need a covenant? That makes no sense to me really.

Renting land is scary, there are so many offers out there, some great, some not so great. I would advise anyone to research, research, research. Even putting into google the potential landlords name can bring up issues that may want you to rethink renting there e.t.c. You are going to be handing over money to someone who never has to pay you back if things go wrong...a LOT do...but that should never be taken as a given.

I can't recommend enough ZoHa Boa from Zoha Islands....I rent a homestead there and have FULL rights, I can even set my own covanant if I wish and that poor man is so patient! LOL I am constantly adding and removing Estate managers!

Ask around in future, check their business set up, are there people on hand if you run into any problems? Oh and if any of their staff are wearing police uniforms...RUN!

I am sorry this does not help your predicament now, its a expensive lesson

Believe it or not, I think the situation is marginally better now than it was, say, two years ago. At one point there was a group of Estate operators (at least one of whom was also an adfarmer--so you get the calibre of individual involved here) whose whole business model was to attract unsuspecting "buyers" of island parcels, collect the purchase price and as much monthly fee as they could get, then boot the buyer to make room for the next victim to be fleeced.

What was particularly diabolical about that scheme was that it selectively targeted the clueless, hence the use of microparcel ads, sure to attract only those unwary of scams.

Surely estate agents in SL are only virtual estate agents, not real estate agents!! Or maybe I'm just being funny and British about it! (we just call them estate agents):lol:

But seriously, I think renting is always at your own risk - over the years I've seen so many stories of residents being done over by landlords / landladies.

Actually, I thought we called them f****** b*******

There are very few "real estate agents" in SL. The fact that the OP calls them that indicates to me that he has not Done His Homework before renting land.

What the OP is referring to is more usually called a "Land Baron" (especially if they own a great deal of land). The official term is "private estate owner".

When you rent land from an estate owner, there is a risk of what happened to the OP happening. The owner holds all the cards. They can evict you for any reason, or no reason. They can go out of business, LL will take back their land, and suddenly your home no longer exists. They can sell the island to someone else who may have other plans for your land. As you found out, the covenant isn't binding, and can be changed at the owner's whim.

Therefore, when renting on a private estate, it's up to YOU to do your research. Read the covenant in the About Land description. Make sure the type of land is what you need (full sim, or prim-limited Homestead?) Above all, research the *owner*. How long have they been in business? How many islands do they own? Do people rant about them in their blogs, or praise them? Are their tenants happy?

Despite your bad experience, most of the private estate owners in SL are honest, reputable people.

"Security personnel"? "Police uniforms"? Good grief! If these people really do work for the estate owner, he's got a real nice scam going here, complete with roleplay. (It's not such good theatre, but most con men will simply evict you, without the amusing show.)

This type of thing is why I thought the worst when I saw what I thought was a too good to be true deal. Hope you get it straightened out Randie.

Why is all this allowed?

Was there clear proof of this?

Methodically and intentionally doing that is otherwise known as interstate, or international wire fraud. The penalties that go along with that are just insanely disproportionally harsh compared to *any* gains anyone might make in Second Life perpetrating such a thing.

And over a certain dollar amount, a few hundred dollars I think, it's considered "grand theft" in the United States. This can be some baaaaad news ~ just imagine the cost of hiring a lawyer and having to fly across the country to deal with that in some provincial courtroom somewhere.

Would this apply if the transactions were in Linden Dollars, though?

The reason I ask is that a lot of games/worlds that use microcurrencies are actually using them to CTA legally - their agreements say something like, "You pay your dollars for Play Money; once you have your Play Money the RL transaction is over; anything may happen to your Play Money after that, but you have agreed that all you paid RL$ for was to have the Play Money paid into your account in the first place."

I shall be the first person to confess that I'm not a brilliant e~lawyer, and don't really know.

Judges are pretty sharp, though.

They see through flimsy excuses all the time, and $L might just be seen as 'part of the scam' if used as such.

Sorry, Des, I lost track of this thread; re the old adfarmer/Estate scam:Not proof in a court of law, AFAIK anyway. There was a thread here that clued me into what was going on, and I learned from a post by Carl Metropolitan that NCI had been warning residents about this scam, dubbing it "pump and dump."

(I can't name names here, but I, uh, "enshrined" and imaged the work of one notorious perpetrator at http://www.flickr.com/photos/22791249@N02/2191503782/. I see that was almost two years ago now.)

I agree that it must have been a pretty risky business practice, but it might have proven difficult to get a court to take the case. The terms of what exactly is being conveyed by an Estate land purchase are pretty fuzzy anyway, and as far as the actual contract service provider (LL) is concerned, interpretation of the Covenant is left completely up to the Estate owner with no oversight whatsoever. Or at least that was the prevailing sentiment at the time, before the Land Fraud category appeared in the AR list.

This is a very simple-sounding statement. But it begs the question, "allowed by whom?"

The obvious answer is "Linden Lab". The OP would, I believe, have LL put rules in place governing transactions between residents, and enforce them.

There's a problem with that. There are about 300 employees of LL, and several hundred thousand regular users of the service. They don't have the manpower to police the grid, or the time to hear charges and countercharges, or even vet and license business owners.

The answer is just what I implied in my first post to you in this thread. What happened to you was not LL's fault. It was certainly the land owner's fault...but you have to shoulder some blame, too. You should have done your research before renting.

to all who read my post and those who took the time to answer thank you.I did do my homework and i quizzed the guy very thoughly and in the end he earned my trust.He did his big backflip when his incompetance and lies were told to his buisiness parteners and he has made up his story to them to protect himself from his mates and sadly for me they believe him over me.He is a liar and a cheat and i sleep comfortably at night knowing i have the truth on my side.But please all beware Lindens will not help you they will protect the big players.So as i see it all the ordinary people in sl should band together and show Lindens and these so called big players that with out us and our cash they have nothing.

Again, I am sorry that you have been ripped off in this way, but I just want to say its nothing to do with the Lindens protecting the "Big Players.." They will not get involved in a resident to resident dispute, period. I wish they would sometimes given some of the things I read on here, but on the flip side, if they did start getting involved, where would it stop? what if the hammers falls on the wrong side as far as you are concerned? It will never be right for someone

I am though sorry you have had this happen, it really pains me to see people ripped off, after all it is real money that buy those lindens somewhere along the line.

There are some great landlords out there, amazing even. Doing a search on this board will bring up a few. I know its easy for me to say, but try not to let this one idiot ruin your SL...

Ah, another one bites the dust.

Get a premium account and buy yourself a nice piece of land, paying the fee's (if bigger than 512sqm) to SL itself. This way you won't get scammed by virtual landlords and live a quiet, happy inworld life on your own private patch.

I think the grand theft minimum amount is 5,000 U.S. dollars. Up to around that is considered 'small claims' and pursuing something in a small claims court is difficult at best. It is also unenforceable if you win the claim. The person will be sent a letter and that is about it. If they decide to default there isn't a whole lot that anyone will do about it. (Been there. Ended by settling, for half what I was owed.)

Trying to pursue something like this if the plaintiff and thief are in different nations or hemispheres is virtually impossible, and I'm sure the thieves know this full well.

I use to be very sympathetic to these type of OP postings.....but i can tell you for every single case of having an EstateOwner reclaiming land or whatever....you can multiply that by x times for the number of residents who are doing a runner with their tiers or rent left in arrears.

For my sins, I happen to be one of those Estate-owners that's very tolerant when Residents run into arrears and give them every chance to make good....unfortunately this year has generally been a nightmare. I can count on 2 hands on the number of occasions a resident has performed a disappearing act and left me holding the baby! I'm not psychic!....I can't know if someone intends to leave without even an IM or notecard. No sign of common courtesy just to inform the Landlord of an impending move. I probably loss a couple hundred dollars this year (it wasn't always like this)

The only difference in these sort of Forums, is that you'll never get an Estate-owner complaining or broadcasting such maligned behaviour, it's always residents informing of us of their tales of woe....it's always the big bad Land Baron! No one hears our horror stories with Residents!!

I've had to change my own rental policy and request a valid email address from each Resident. Should they be away from SL for extended periods of time. I'm now able to contact them offline.

My attitude has completely changed over the last 1/2 year, .....for me its become dog eats dog....and it's down to the individual to do the necessary research when leasing/ renting Land. Likewise, I'm less likely to lease/ rent to those without PIOF...certainly not large tracks of land.

Grrr....no sympathy from this corner anymore!

It depends on the state law for the most part. In Kentucky, under $300.00 is a misdemeanor and over $300.00 and up is a felony. For the Federal laws, I don't know if they have a limit on their interstate fraud laws or not.

well Rene i sure do sympathise with you!!!! did your runners lie and cheat and change the conditions after they rented.I think not.The person i am dealing with has lied from the minute i met him and sadly i never realised this till i paid my cash.So Rene i really hope you are an honest agent and if you are this is not aimed at you

I would say some of those residents that ended up disappearing into cloud blatantly lied to me....making false promises. I heard an armada of different excuses during that time (The "waiting for Paypal transferred funds" was the most common one used!)

Yes, there are some dodgy Estates out there, I always advise potential Land seekers (even if they don't end up being my Resident) to do their research and provide them with a number of pointers as mentioned already on this thread.

What I'm saying there are scammers on both sides of the fence.....but unfortunately we only ever get to read the Resident's stories. There's very little sympathy for Land Barons...i guess one presumes they are well off in the first instance.... and can take a financial loss here and there.

I think the difference is not just in which reports we get (and that is certainly skewed), but the tremendous asymmetry of power: A defaulting resident can degrade a Land Baron's profit margin, which is unfair and bad and they shouldn't do that, but an Estate-owning scammer* can displace a tenant and steal their pre-paid rent, simply destroying their in-world livelihood or home with a single stroke.

So it's more dramatic and makes a better story. A comparable story for Estate owners would be if LL (somehow) suddenly stole all Estate sims from the owners. Now that would make a compelling story.

______
* Not fit to be dignified with the title "Land Baron"

It's a cost of doing business but there is huge gaping hole in the courtesy stakes, it doesn't take long to say you're not going to renew your lease and no decent landlord is going to evict you for wanting to move on before your term is up.

Sadly i must report that after 3 weeks my issue remains unresolved and the greedy estate agent still has my money and i still cant use or sell the land.I ask you all to take care in dealing with agents and dont trust all of them.it amazes me though that i had a clear cut case of theft of my 29k and nothing was done by the lindens to help me,even after countless abuse reports and tickets NOTHING yet a friend has been accused of some kind of misconduct regarding child porn,of which the charges were unfounded and not true but just one or two peoples way of revenge against my friend and he is banned and faces an uncertain future.There is no place in sl for any child porn or any underage sex play and my friend is tottally innocent of the accusations layed against him yet as i said an unfounded allegation and he is banned yet my case of the theft of my 29k which i can prove goes unresolved.
To the good people at Lindens help us residents and dont sit on the sidelines.
Give us an avenue to resolve disputes and set up an independant umpire or a virtual court so we can once and for all have our justice as we have in our RL's

Randy - unfortunately LL has always stated that they would not intervene into resident-to-resident disputes, which also included the old Casinos (pay-outs), balances left in SL Banks, Land transactions on Estate sims and Land Bot swipes on Mainland. There's probably other major scams i've left out. I'm not saying it's correct....but LL would have to create a separate Dept. to deal with internal disputes. (not profitable for LL)

Yep, anything to do with child sex or the possibility of being under aged, are the latest rage of griefing. Unfortunately in that deparment. LL acts heavy handedly.....they'll suspend or ban accounts first....ask questions later! This is totally wrong imo.