OS Landlords Adding to the Rip Off

Are there any OS landlords that are planning to assume a percentage of the added OS fees as opposed to passing the entire increase to the renter? I'm dealing with one landlord who's not only passing on the entire increase, but is using the occasion to raise the rent even more.

Are there really that many people that are going to shell out $170 or a month for a 3750 prim sim that doesn't perform any better than before? I know I'm not. Maybe Linden should consider allowing sale of OS (homestead) sims to anybody as opposed to restricting them to full sim owners.

I won't pass on any of the increase but I only have one so it's easy for me to take that line.

maybe the landlord is hedging against future short-notice increases.

I can't believe any renter would pay the proposed increase, let alone additional...I know I won't

Ashe

I dunno... if i were a landlord I'd be reviewing my business model, big-time. For example I'd be re-calculating how long it will take to recover my initial investment, and rethinking the risk involved with a month-to-month contract with the ISP. Who knows what monthly rental figure I'd come up with after that analysis.

I can understand the landlord passing on the increase. They aren't usually doing this for charity work. Adding even more profit in seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face, though. The mainland is so terrible, that I suspect anyone who's actually lived there will try to pay the increase, or get a smaller plot of estate land to help cut their cost.

All in all, LL sucks. This is a unethical, nasty way to make more money. It is, when all is said and done, a bait and switch job. They know how awful mainland is, and how so many people love SL and will not move to the crappy mainland, so they figure they can get by with it. Frankly, I hope there are some good lawyers on the case, because bait and switch is illegal, not just unethical.

Shame on you, LL. Shame on you. How do you sleep at night? How do you look in the mirror? Only cold, greedy people could live with doing this. The same kind of people who's greed has brought the USA to it's economical knees. Shame on you.

It's a bad situation all around. There will always be some segment of humanity that sees a bad circumstance as an opportunity for profit. At least in this situation, the tennants have some warning and the option to pick up and move.

There've been reports around here of some OS islands just vanishing along with all the objects and belongings that were rezzed on them, because the owner told LL to pull the plug, but didn't provide any warning to the customers. (I am pretty sure that when LL pulls the plug they don't do it in world, hence they don't reclaim the land and return the prims... they just push a button and the island shuts down along with any objects that were on it.)

Either way, through greed, carelessness, or some misguided sense of spite, people are hurt by this. Estate owners are hurt, and customers/residents are hurt.

For what its worth, on my small estate no decisions were made until I had discussed the options with those renting OS sims from me. For the regions that are going to be removed, I've given people over a week's warning, made sure they were empty (no prims left) and where this impacted people who had to move before their rent was up, I refunded money.

If anyone is interested in seeing how the situation evolved and was handled on Waikiti, visit our blog: http://www.waikiti.com/blog

This whole debacle has, IMHO, permanently damaged LL's reputation and trustworthiness. I'm not going to sell off or abandon everything and leave SL. But I'm a lot more wary about who I'm dealing with, now that they've shown in no uncertain terms what they think of us.

Equally upsetting to me is that the reputations of estate owners in general are being tarnished at the same time - first by LL by accusing us all of being 'abusers' and second by the unscrupulous minority who have been making a bad situation worse.

-Atashi

The sad part about all this is we who rent have been paying this proposed increase all along and more in some cases,for me it is right now
tier $75
estate owner profit $36
exchange to US funds approx $21 (unavoidable but still an expense)
Total =$131
LL made a new product with the HS,now estate owners have two islands to rent,although i'm not sure if there will be any demand for the new OS
Also not sure if there will be much demand for HS either
It would be nice if LL gave the option to buy directly from them,the OS were first created as an openspace for estate owners,we all know the rest of the story that brought us to all this mess
The HS being a supposedly new product should be sold by LL,
I know,i know i've heard the argument how if they (LL) sold them costs will go up to administrate them,but with this price increase i doubt there will be much demand for them anyway
But in the end,i guess it's better for LL to be cruel to renters than to be cruel to all the landowners (more cruel than they are now) they would piss off if they sold HS themselves

LL really needs to drop this free-marketeer, strongest-will-survive philosophy. LL believes that renters will simply not do business with landlords who have a bad reputation, and all will be right. It's a lofty view of the way the world works, especially considering that their is no institution for resolving resident disputes, and limited recourse for fraud. I wonder how many good customers this hard-headed philosophy has cost LL?

Why????

Why should a business eat the cost of operating (LL price increase) and not recoup it through their business model?

Would you feel right if your landlord told you they were going to eat the 50% of the price increase and pass the rest to you? That would feel like charity to me. I do not want someone paying out money for me to make my life easier when i have not earned it. That is welfare.

I'm not quite following you here, what is the exchange to US funds part for?

This is reality. There is nothing lofty about it. There are plenty examples in our real lives of services that monitor businesses and relay their findings to the public that inquires.

How is it lofty to not expect a person to rent from someone that has 4 different posts on the forums decrying their poor service?

How is it lofty to expect someone to not use a service where 1 or 2 other people told them they have heard of others getting burned from that service.

Nothing lofty at all about rational logic.

To show the total cost i pay now,the exchange is still an expense added to the tier which is unavoidable,what is avoidable is the profit if LL would sell the HS,then the only added expense beyond $125 would be the exchange to US funds

== four good customers suspended from the forums for naming names + one landlord walking away with all the money.

If you live in Europe you're going to be hit by VAT too. 21 bucks seems awfully expensive, what are you basing that figure on?

Just what i thought. You have nothing but fallacy.

Not worth discussing anything with a person who is going to create bogus scenarios to support a bogus rational.

What do you mean 'adding' to it? Open your eyes people! They were a huge part of what got us into this mess! If you leased an Openspace region on their basis that it was 'Basically like a full private island, except it has a few less prims, and is WAY cheaper', and that was the end of it without an honest discussion of their capabilities and policy, then you need to have a talk with your estate owner before you blow your stack on Linden Labs. Somebody has to be the enabler here, right? It was the guy who leased it to you, who presumably being a smart businessperson read and understood the policy but did it ANYWAY because 'the market told him to'. And you're all willing to give them a free pass! Unbelievable!

Honestly, does this sound familiar to nobody??

And yes, they're going to pass the increase on to their users. That's the way business works. The margins on those damn things are so tiny to begin with. I know two big estate owners who would have been happy to not deal with them except for the hordes of people who wanted 'Basically like a full private island with maybe less prims and WAY cheaper'. Familiar again?

Do people feel better being mad at Linden Labs instead of their fellow residents?

This "policy" you keep referring to was vague and pretty much ignored by LL. Any way your hard rules were nothing but suggestions.

Of course now LL is trying to shear the sheep a little closer by hiking the prices while reducing performance. So the suddenly found these "rules" they had so nicely forgotten earlier.

How many times do we have to go through this Michelle? There was no policy. It didn't exist. Who was the enabler? You pretty much point the finger without realising it in your next paragraph.



Who allowed the situation to get to the stage where those big estate owners gave into popular demand? Who ignored those raising questions for months, those who pointed out what was happening and gleefully counted the bucks instead? Linden Lab that's who They damn well deserve the blame, they knew what was happening from the very start and to try and absolve all responsibility now is unethical to say the least.

'Giving in to market forces' is something you choose to do at your own peril, and something you choose not to do at your own peril.

So retail estate owners are totally and absolutely blameless in this whole situation?

Not at all, those who tried to use a loophole to allow more prims were at fault. Those who tried to use the prim bonus to lie about the available prims were at fault.

There was a guy complaining at an office hour that an independent French Orientation island had been told they couldn't use an Openspace for such a purpose. It was too busy for such use, hence LL did act on so called "abuse".

I know im not gonna get a popularity vote with this and yes of course there ae unscrupulous landlords in LS as there are in Rl, but I have been reading for a few days the comments about estate owners and no I am not an estate owner, but please think about things.

1. Estate owners had to take the risk and expense of buying a full sim in the first place.

2. If the estate owner is in Europe you can add 17-21% to their costs both in the initial set up and in the monthly tier.

3. IF they allow you to pay in Linden- a convenience to you.... they have to deal with exchange rates as well. This is an additional fee.

4. IF you pay your tier by PayPal there are costs the sim owner has to pay there maybe 3% or so.

5. You have the luxury of leaving that land without notice at anytime, but the estate owner still has to cover the tier costs the next month whether the sim is empty or full.

6. When you purchase a sim it takes time to recover your initial investment even if the sim is 100% occupied and few are.

7. Most of these estate owners recently dealt with LL lowering the cost of full sims and devaluing their assets by 40% overnight without any notice and then flooding the market with new sim sales because of the lower cost of buying one. LL did this without regard to the effects on the existing estate owners. If they had not yet recouped their initial investment this blow was multiplied.

8. Then when LL released the openspaces in a cheaper more attractive product the renters/consumers fled the parcels on full sims and begged for openspaces. Thus leaving estate owners with big occupancy issues and tier to pay regardless

9. Some estate owners were forced to convert full sims to openspace sims just to stay afloat much less stay competitive. I am not sure but I believe this was also at a cost or fee from LL and again if we are talking about a european owner we are also talking about VAT on top of those costs.

10. Those who had the full sim already have the cost of the openspace to bring online and that has to be recovered.

Estate owners are very much victims of LL in this whole fiasco that began even before openspace sims were made so attractive.

They have invested hugely in SL so you could have a nice private space apart from the mailnand to live and create and I know a lot of estate owners and few of them are "getting rich" on the backs of their renters. Most are just trying not to lose their butts.

If you bought an open sim for 24,000 linden and tier of 30k Linden a month and that was the going rate for a long time that I could see. Then assuming 1K linden is $4 usd that covered $96 of a 250 investment if they had a full sim already and a 1250 investment if they had to buy one.

If you paid rent of 30K linden a month it would take them approximately 3 and a half months to recover the initial investment of $250. If they had to buy a sim to be able to buy the openspace then it would take them 21 months to recover their cost of bringing them online before ever showing a single penny of profit and that does not include costs of paypal or vat or even exchange of linden.

It frustrates me to see resident against resident in all this. That is exactly what LL has tried to do all along in this. The estate owners are not the enemy in this LL is. The estate owners were the ones who believed enough in all our dreams to invest in the first place so that many of us who dont have the capital to invest could play. It is so easy to sit back and look and think they are getting rich off of their investments; but lets remember they carry all the risk and because LL makes willy nilly decisions without regard to any of us - those risks are sometimes very big.

I hope that we can remain solid- we are the ones who grew this grid 44% in land mass and it is our creativity that makes this a place people wanna come. Let us not turn against each other.

Sincerely,
Luci

A 20% exchange rate to US funds on the $111 tier i pay

That's extortionate, find another bank!

It depends on the desired profit margins of the estate owner. Luckily for the prospective tenants of Second Life, you have thousands of estates to choose from.

I remember several estates who advertised on these very forums who were literally only making $5 USD a month profit on each openspace they owned. (And that's not even taking the $250 purchase price into account, since most of them didn't "sell" their parcels, they only charged rent; technically, all of them were set to operate in the red for the next FOUR YEARS assuming LL never raised the prices).

Someone who only makes $5 "profit" on a pure rental sim cannot continue to do business if the cost of that sim goes up by $20 in January (and then by another $30 in July). If your openspace/homestead prices don't go up in January, it's because the estate owner had a steep profit margin at the old openspace prices and is going to absorb a significant margin reduction once the prices go back up.