Buying Shares in Neualtenburg: Step by Step

This post has been superceded by Post Number Nine. Please check that one out.
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Sudane


Here are the step by step topics for buying shares in Neualtenburg, entitling the owner to land. Please let me know your comments. When the details are all agreed, I thought that this info could go on a notecard available at a dispensor in the Marketplatz.

Buying Shares in Neualtenburg
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1) Identify the property that you'd like. Use the Neualtenburg Land Journal at http://www.tospitimou.com/Neualtenburg/NeualtenburgLandJournal.pdf (we'll have a link to this on the Neualtenburg site soon) and the Map of Neualtenburg, which Ulrika is finishing up. The Land Journal will give you the price of each lot, and the monthly fee which you'll be required to pay in order to keep it.

Remember, all the land in Neualtenburg falls either within the city walls, or outside them, and there are different rules in place regarding each catagory. In addition, outside the walls, in the NW Viertel, there is a zone designated for modern-style builds. The rest of the valley will have the Bavarian theme of the City. Using "About Land", check and make sure that someone else hasn't already acquired this land.

(Note: As of this writing, the NW Viertel was not yet divided into parcels. If you're interested in this section, contact Ulrika).

If you'd like a section of land outside the walls, but the parcel as it's defined isn't quite the right size or shape for you, contact Ulrika or myself (Sudane), and we may be able to alter some plot lines.

And, most important, visit all around the sim. Check everything out. There are many wonderful parcels, of all sorts, to be found.

2) Next, you'll need to agree to the covenant which the members of Neualtenburg have created. See the site www.neualtenburg.org for full information about the goals and purposes of our group. In order to maintain the nature and quality of our sim, we've agreed that all participants will become members of Neualtenburg, adhere to the covenants, and participate in the administration of them. You'll find the covenant as it exists now at /103/9a/39382/1.html#post507587 .

There are also the Terms of Service (ToS) which must be accepted. These are at:
/103/c6/47074/1.html. As of this writing, they have not yet been compiled into a single document.

At this point, contact Ulrika. She'll provide you with a Deed to the land in the form of this:
/103/9a/39382/1.html#post507584 We'll need to have your SL name, your group (see the next section) and your email in order to execute a Deed.

3) Neualtenburg is a private sim owned and operated by the group Neualtenburg. In order to deed shares of that sim to you, an individual citizen of the group, you must be a group yourself. This is the Second Life system by which the owners of a sim can deed land to an individual (to another group), allowing you to have all the tools that a normal SL landowner would have. So, you must have a group. The group can be simply you and two friends, or it can even be you and two alts. You DO NOT have to be a premium member of SL in order to own shares in Neualtenburg, but you do have to be a group.

Once you've formed, or decided upon, a group, you'll need to invite one of the officers of the Neualtenburg Raumnutzung, the Neualtenburg Land Management Group, temporarily into your group. This officer will deed the land to your group, in accordance with the Deed which Ulrika has. The current officers of this group are:

Ulrika Zugswang
Sudance Erato
Gwyn Llewelyn
Kendra Bancroft
Rudeen Edo

Any of these folks can accomplish the deeding for you, once the covenants are agreed to, and the purchase amount is paid.

4) Money. The Neualtenburg Land Journal lists each parcel, what it costs to buy into that share, and what the monthly fee is. When you buy a share, the first partial month is free of the monthly fee. The fee will be due no later than the 21st day of the next month, and no later than the 21st day of each month after that.

Your payments can be made in US dollars using the Neualtenburg Paypal Account, or in Linden dollars by "Paying" Lindens to Uma Bauhaus or to Rudeen Edo. The Paypal account can be accessed via a link on the Neualtenburg site, by sending funds from your Paypal account to [email]sudane.erato@gmail.com[/email], or by IM-ing me or emailing me so that I can send you an "invoice" which you can use to pay. Please be alert to the fact that when you make a Paypal payment, the name which you have registered with your Paypal account becomes visible to me (the Paypal account administrator); so, if you wish to maintain your privacy, use Lindens, or establish an alternate Paypal account under your SL name. Ulrika can help you with instructions on this.

No matter what method you choose to make your payments, after each payment, please email ( [email]sudane.erato@gmail.com[/email] ) or IM me to tell me the amount of the payment, and to which account you made it. This is very important so that we can keep track of payments. Hopefully, as time goes on, we'll develop better systems which more automatically record your payments.

5) Please understand that the group Neualtenburg is very serious about its system of administration and finances. All members, which means all shareholders, have a voice in this administration. But those who are not able to abide by the rules of the covenant which the group has established, or who cannot maintain their monthly contributions for the support of the coop, will be sugject to having their land reclaimed. Rudeen Edo is technically the "owner" of the sim, and upon the decision of the appropriate administrative group, will reclaim the land of anyone who cannot maintain cooperative participation.


Sudane

This is great stuff! I'll take this information (or the information on the note card) and put it up on the web site too by next weekend, when we officially open.

Another thing that would be of great use is, if we could come up with a list for us with clearly delegated responsibilities in order to pipeline folks into the city with the minimum of delay and confusion. For instance:

1. Education and Sales: Every prospective citizen will go through a stage of acquiring information. Some people will use the web page, some will look around in world, some will talk to individual members. We need a group of volunteers to handle this initial educational phase (a combination of representative and salesperson). I'm particularly bad at this, as I always tend to be quite busy, when I'm in world.
   
2. Decision and Contract: Once folks have decided, someone will have to contact them by email and have them agree to our terms of service. This seems like a good job for me. I can then update the web page to show that the land has been taken.
   
3. Billing and Deeding: Someone here needs to send the citizen their bill and then deed the land over to the group of their choice. This seems like a good job for Sudane (or her sister Rudeen).
   

How does this sound?

~Ulrika~

Right. "Decision and Contract" makes sense for Ulrika, "Billing and Deeding" makes sense for me. We need volunteers for "Education and Sales". I'm happy to help with that; anyone interested should feel free to contact me whether I'm in world or not. But it would really be great to have some other folks as well. Unless you read the site, AND the forum, the whole arrangement can be a little confusing.

Sudane

Wow, Sudane & Ulrika, this looks wonderful...!

I'm available for "education and sales" (although I'm a bad salesperson myself, lol). If you have some time available Sunday 10 AM PST (the usual RA meeting time) we can discuss this a bit!

As to "signing the agreement", the easiest way is to give them a notecard which is set to "copy/mod". People get the notecard, copy it to a "blank" notecard, add their names to the bottom (or add a copyable texture with their SL signature, mark, logo, whatever), and set it to "no-copy/no-mod" - and return it to someone in the group. That way, the notecard will have as "creator" the name of the resident agreeing with the contract. Fortunately, due to the nature of SL, you may change the owner of things, but never the creator or the content of the notecard, so this is a pretty safe "proof" of agreement.

Gwyn, this is great. The whole issue of contracts in SL is certainly a major topic: how can a culture so totally devoted to business transactions exist without the simple mechanisms of the enforceable contract?

Your suggestion doesn't do that, but it does create a "certain" record of assent (like a signature), which is one step towards an enforceable contract. In a way, the ability of the private sim "owner" to "reclaim" land is another possible step towards enforceability, although the mechanisms don't yet exist to guarantee that that is anything other than the whim of an individual. Hopefully, the systems of Neualtenburg can contribute to this.

But, the question arises. Since the notecard is nocopy/no mod, who should hold it? In other words, how should it be properly recorded, and available if needed?

Talk about inventing the wheel!


Sudane

How about some sort of visual deed that is held by the City but displayed (as a framed certificate) on the rental property? Should the renter not meet his/her agreeents (either with the covenent or with his bill) the City will remove the certificate, thus ending the renter's contract with the City.

Interesting! Sort of like the "License to Do Business" that many store owners in RL have to display at their place of business.

Tho, not "rental property" Owned shares in a coop. They call the document here in New York the "Proprietary Lease", and, even though you own the shares, if you violate the terms of the "Lease", you can be evicted (and forced to sell).


Sudane

Kendra, "displayed" has just the disadvantage that it will sort of clash with the structures - unless you made it tiny, of course

The other day I was writing an idea about an "electronic notary" in SL, but sadly I quit my browser by mistake, and lost all the text, and then quickly forgot about it The suggestion was pretty simple: you dropped the notecards inside a special object somewhere in a public place (the Marktplatz, for instance). You could not delete it, but by using some interface, you could list the available notecards, and retrieve a copy at will. That way, all contracts would be public, and everybody would be able to confirm that the "creator" of the contracts was truly the person signing it. I thought a bit on how to program that, and my biggest problem was to create a simple interface that lists all available notecards inside, and allows for an easy selection - thinking that this would probably contain a few hundred contracts after perhaps a year or so, as people buy and sell shares of Neualtenburg. Both these limitations ("list all notecards", "simple interface" are well above my own scripting abilties

A possibility would be to "say" the name of a resident, and the "electronic notary" would give you a dialog box with the first 12 contracts signed by the resident, for you to choose. That would probably work. Still, handling hundreds of thousands of objects will need complex storage systems with several prims, and messages going across those prims to try to figure out where exactly the correct notecard is stored. Scripting such a system is wildly beyond my own abilities.

One could also devise a system that sends the content of the notecards (with it's creator UUID) to a web site, and make all the searches there, and even ask the web site to retrieve the correct notecard and give it to the interested party. That would give us a much cleaner interface, but it also has a disadvantage - people in SL are currently going through another paranoid phase about capturing in-world information and presenting it on a web page. Also, I must admit that I'm all for in-world interfaces (although I love the way you can interact with Web servers!)

Well, some food for thought. I guess that the simplest way right now is just to have a prim set to group, and ask people to drop their contracts inside - all members of the group are able to pick a copy from there It's manual, not so nifty and cool, but it works for starters until we can script a better system

I've revised the information in Post One of this thread, and hopefully made the process more clear. There are still a couple of things which are undetermined, particularly the process by which a citizen accepts, and records that acceptance, of the covenants and the ToS.

I've also added the edited comments by Ellie Edo regarding the pros and cons of private sim ownership in general, with the idea of helping the prospective citizen better understand the arrangement. If we all approve of this document, I'll certainly let her know we're using it. As you can see from her post, she intended the material to take the form of a notecard.

Should this all be acceptable, I'd like to place it in a notecard dispensor in the Marketplatz. Hopefully, the entire material can become part of the site, as well.



Buying Shares in Neualtenburg
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So you've visited Neualtenburg and you find it truly fascinating. And, you've heard that homes and parcels here sell for very competitive rates, so you're interested.

Well, we'd love to have you as a citizen member of Neualtenburg. The first thing you need to do is find out about us. Neualtenburg has it's own website, www.Neualtenburg.org, where you find out all of the principles and concepts which we are about. Neualtenburg is a non-profit cooperative, comprised of the citizen members themselves. We own the sim, and together participate in all the desicions which affect it. By buying a parcel, you are really buying shares in the coop, and a right and obligation to participate in all those decisions which will affect you. So, if you're buying in, you need to know as much as you can about it.

There is a lot of information here. If you'd like any help, have any questions, or would just like to talk with someone here about the issues involved with Neualtenburg, contact one of our Neualtenburg "liaisons":

Ulrika Zugswang
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Sudane Erato
Eugene Pomeray
(others ?)


STEP ONE. Identify the property that you'd like. Use the Neualtenburg Land Journal at http://www.tospitimou.com/Neualtenburg/NeualtenburgLandJournal.pdf and the Map of Neualtenburg, found on the site. The Land Journal will give you the price of each lot, and the monthly fee which you'll be required to pay in order to keep it.

Remember, all the land in Neualtenburg falls either within the city walls, or outside them, and there are different rules in place for each section. In addition, outside the walls, in the NW Viertel, there is a zone designated for modern-style builds. The rest of the valley will have the Bavarian theme of the City. Using "About Land", check and make sure that someone else hasn't already acquired this land. Owners will also be listed in the Land Journal. If About Land lists the owner as Neualtenburg Raumnutzung (the Land Management group), the land is available. It could also be for sale by another citizen.

If you'd like a section of land outside the walls, but the parcel as it's defined isn't quite the right size or shape for you, contact any of the members of the Neualtenburg Raumnutzung, and we may be able to alter some plot lines.

And, most important, visit all around the sim. Check everything out. There are many wonderful parcels, of all sorts, to be found.

STEP TWO. You must be a group. In order to deed shares of the sim to you, an individual citizen of the group, you must be a group yourself. This is the Second Life system by which the owners of a sim can deed land to someone, allowing you to have all the tools that a normal SL landowner would have. So, you must have a group. The group can be simply you and two friends, or it can even be you and two alts. You DO NOT have to be a premium member of SL in order to own shares in Neualtenburg, but you do have to be a group.

STEP THREE. Agree to the rules. Neualtenburg is a group of residents who together own and manage their sim. In order to do so, they've put in place a number of rules. When you become a member, you gain the right, and the responsibility, to participate in the making of those rules.
The goals, purposes, ideals and structures are all described at www.neualtenburg.org.
There are two documents you must agree to. These are the covenants, sort of the "House Rules", which you'll find at http://forums.secondlife.com/showpo...587&postcount=4 ; and the Terms of Service (ToS) /103/c6/47074/1.html ; modelled after, and looking very similiar to, the ToS for Second Life itself.

STEP FOUR. Execute the Deed. Contact Rudeen Edo. She is the alt of Sudane Erato, who is the Treasurer for this term of office. Rudeen is technically the "owner" of the sim, so her action is required for all shares transfers. Just IM her, and she'll get back to you quickly.

Rudeen will provide you with a deed. The deed ( in the form seen here http://forums.secondlife.com/showpo...584&postcount=3 ) is the document that transfers the rights to the parcel to you; really, to your group. You'll "sign" it by making a no-mod/no-copy copy of her document, so that your name becomes the "Owner" of the notecard. That card will then be deposited in the Street Number Sign by your door, or an equivalent object on your "Outside The Walls" property. By signing it you agree to abide by the rules and procedures of Neualtenburg. You'll need to supply your name, your group's name, and your email address.

STEP FIVE. Pay your Purchase Price. The Neualtenburg Land Journal lists each parcel, what it costs to buy into that share, and what the monthly fee is. When you buy a share, the first partial month is free of the monthly fee. The fee will be due no later than the 21st day of the next month, and no later than the 21st day of each month after that.

You can pay using Paypal if you wish, using the Neualtenburg Paypal account link on the website, or simply by sending a Paypal payment to [email]sudane.erato@gmail.com[/email]. But currently we highly recommend that you make your payments using in-world Linden$ directly to Rudeen. Unless you are in her presence when you do so, PLEASE IM me, or email me, [email]sudane.erato@gmail.com[/email], whenever you make a payment. I'll email an acknowledgement receipt, and your payment is sure to get recorded. We hope to automate this process in the near future so that it's less cumbersome.

STEP SIX. Experience the transfer. At this point you can just step back and wait while Rudeen transfers the parcel to you. You'll need to invite her into your group temporarily as an officer. She will perform the transfer, and then "Leave" your group. She'll also deposit the copy of your Deed in the House Street Sign, so anyone can inspect it and know that you are the owner.

STEP SEVEN. Responsibility. Please understand that the group Neualtenburg is very serious about its system of administration and finances. All members, which means all shareholders, have a voice in this administration. You certainly won't be ejected simply for non-participation, but those who are not able to abide by the rules of the covenant and ToS which the group has established, or who cannot maintain their monthly contributions for the support of the coop, will be subject to having their land reclaimed. Rudeen Edo is technically the "owner" of the sim, and upon the decision of the appropriate administrative group, will reclaim the land of anyone who cannot maintain cooperative participation.


Here are some important points to consider about the process of land share ownership which is being offered at Neualtenburg. It was originally written and posted on the forum by Ellie Edo ( /130/28/48407/1.html#post514614 ) and concerned itself with the phenomenon of private sim land sales in general. We have modified it slightly to fit the circumstances here. Remember, when Ellie refers to "landlord", in Neualtenburg the landlord is the group of residents themselves, making all decisions about the sim cooperatively.
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Land Leasing Pros and Cons - or when is a Sale Not a Sale ?

Some residents may offer to "sell you land" which they "own" when in fact they are selling not land, but a transferable (resellable) coop share agreement or lease giving the right to occupy land belonging to a landlord, who is another resident. These leases are often priced just below normal land value, and can appear misleadingly similar. You may be offered one of these by the landlord himself, who will hopefully be quite careful to explain the implications to you. But you may be offered it by the present leaseholder, who needs you to replace him or her and can normally charge you any "price" he likes. His communication skills may not be quite so good, or he may not fully understand it himself. He might even prefer to let you be confused.

If you are to consider this you need to be careful to understand the advantages and disadvantages of occupying land in this way. Detailed pros and cons are laid out below.

The big disadvantage: The Lindens have warned that you are entirely reliant on your landlord's honesty and continued presence in the game. He can evict you (or everyone) without compensation at any moment, so that you may lose your "purchase price", and LL have stated they will not intervene, or discipline him in any way. The lease is currently a private non-enforceable agreement between you and him. No such fraud has yet occurred, but the potential is there. There may be other risks associated with him falling ill, failing to make his payments to SL, or simply losing interest.

The big advantage: Your landlord may promise to act as a private police force, enforcing standards of behaviour and building quality in a way which LL will not. He will normally have a set of rules and guidelines which you and everyone else must obey on peril of land forfeiture. These "private sims" can look very nice, can be free of malls, clubs, and greifers, and can have attractive "themes".

Other aspects to consider are: Acquiring a plot, and transferring it to others, requires the attendance of the landlord, who alone has the power to do these things. You have to form a group to hold the lease (so that the landlord can act through it). This needs two other players, and costs L$100 to form. If you dont have two other players you trust, you can create two more characters (known as "alts" at a one-off cost of US19.90 (currently, May 2005, about L$5000). Apart from your inability to sell and advertise it normally via the "about land" dialogue (because the landlord still owns it) you have all the normal controls over your land. This only became possible recently, which is why this form of leasing is currently so new.

Since you are not the landowner, you do not need to pay a monthly (premium) subscription, thus saving US$9.95 per month (currently about L$2500). This is not as valuable as it looks, because paying it gets you L$1800 per month in extra stipend, which you lose if you stop. Neither (obviously) do you pay tier (land fees) to LL. Instead you pay rent directly to your landlord, which he may himself call "tier".

Many landlords fix this rent at the same level as the tier you would otherwise pay as owner. (Though remember that LL charges no tier for 512m - this is why most leases offer 1024m minimum - the landlord can't afford to match LL's free 512m offer.) But any other pricing or timing arrangement is possible - whatever the landlord offers, and you agree. This rent flexibility can provide a further advantage in that you may be able to hold amounts of land sized just above a LL "tier boundary" whilst only paying a small proportional rent increment.

The key to recognising when you are being offered a lease rather than full land ownership is that you will be unable to buy the land on your own simply by clicking it, but will need someone to come transfer it to you, or will be referred to a website for details on "how to buy".

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Thanks Ellie for these careful warnings. We hope they explain even more thoroughly the idea of "deeded" land in a private sim like Neualtenburg.

I read this carefully (or so I hope) and find no fault with it Excellent work, Sudane - it really cleared some things for me.

I hope that this information can be used in the site soon, and if you all agree, I'd be very glad if this gets added to the notecard dispensor (the big red exclamation mark) in the Marktplatz. Or we can get a special notecard dispensor just for that text.

Also, I wonder which of the Classified Ads in the forums should get this posting as well...

Your post is brilliant! I'll include it in its entirety on the web page.

~Ulrika~