Down payment, rent per week and rent per week per sm in Estate land sales search

I'd like to have something like Down Payment, Rent per week in dollars, rent per week in lindens, and rent per week per sm in both dollars and lindens in Estate land sales search.

Weeks could be months, or maybe per day would be the best, since people could enter the value in whichever time unit they want to get paid by and the system could calculate the value per day.

The currency would only be filled in for the units the seller/lessors entered.

I want to be able to price shop efficiently without having to go to the place to see what the real amounts are. The prices shown in the descriptions in the land search are frequently different from you see when you go to the parcel.

Also, might as well be able to read the convenant without going to the parcel.

How would this be enforced?

I have no idea!

Implementation is left to the reader, or umm.... anyone that's not me... as an exercise.

One way would be to not enforce it - just let people give us the figures, if they turn out to be false when we get there we will know who not to trust.

Let's see, who not to trust.... create a block ad field in people's and group's profiles; when we think someone is giving false figures we block ads from that person. If the sellers displease us, they lose their chance at the potential income stream we represent - forever, or till we get over it.

For places that rent in Lindens it is conceptually possible for the SL system to handle this - it doesn't violate any laws of physics. Parcels would have a down payment field and a rent per time field. To rent it you'd click on some dialog boxes authorizing down payment and first months rent, and agreeing to the covenant. Your about land display would include the amount and due date for each parcel you rent.

For places that charge in real currency through paypal - I have no idea how it would be enforced. What happens in the real world if you read a classified ad for an apartment for rent and when you get there you are told the rent is higher than the price in the ad?

I remember going to multiple listing service places in the real world, before everything was networked together, waiting to look at paper printouts of places for rent. I assume the information was collected by telephone and snail mail. The ads would be sorted by location and by price, if I remember correctly, possibly sorted manually.

Flying around to get data that could be gathered for us in one spot, searchable and sortable, sucks. We do better than that in the real world. We should be able to do better than that in the virtual.

Reminds me of how to effectively utilize Bozo Sort (i.e. "52 card pickup"

1) Initiate Bozo Sort
Bozo Sort, being a quantum action results in N universes where N is the number of possible outcomes, each universe has a different result.
2) Check to see if the list is sorted
3) If the list is not sorted, destroy the universe
For each universe where Bozo Sort did not return a sorted list, it destroys itself leaving only 1 universe in which the list is sorted.

Impementation of Step 3 is left as an exercise to the reader.

And now back to your regularly sceduled topic.

I like the idea though.

This, I believe, is the truly important part of your response.

The system in use now was designed before private estates with parcels that could be rented existed, is that right?

When they made private estates they didn't do a full and proper job of implementing a payment system.

As far as I know. I never looked into land either before or after. Seeing as the search itself has changed little (read "none" I would venture to say that it's true.

You think that's a joke, do you? It's not, Computational Complexity and the Anthropic Principle uses this technique to establish the computational bounds of quantum computing devices.

This will work about as well as the ideas that people have come up with to prevent resale of freebies buy putting restrictions on the "Buy..." dialog. People have scripted rental boxes and will continue to have scripted rental boxes, and they won't show up in the rental dialog.

Depending on where you are you go to the cops, the meta-cops, or sue the beggar. Now... who are the cops here?

My brain hurts. o..o
And I'm quite well aware that it is not actually a joke, but it is humourous none the less.
And besides, a Computer Science major told me--I believe it was in his coursebook with the text "step three is left as an exercise to the reader."

Why would this idea not work? When you paid the down payment and first rent in lindens through the built in rental system you'd have it rented, same as when you pay the buy price of something you have it bought. Folks use their scripted boxes now because there is no rental mechanism built into the SL interface. Give then a rental system built into the interface and they wouldn't need to use the rent boxes.

As the private estate system works now, you see a parcel description which often contains prices that disagree with the actual price you see when you get to the parcel and read the covenant and the notecards in the rental boxes. People are getting mislead now, with no mechanism to enforce the claims in the land descriptions.

Are you really saying you think it's impossible to build a rental system into the interface? That seems rather silly.

This would certainly halt most of the unethical efforts of unscrupulous PI owners

Because estates are not managed by Linden Labs. They're managed by the estate owner, who can take the land back any time they want, for any reason, regardless of terms, contracts, and covenants. They can change the rent any time. Unless buying the land through the Linden interface *prevents them* from changing the terms, selling the island, or taking back the land, someone who wants to abuse the system will be able to do so.

Being able to set a box for sale hasn't kept people from using scripted vendors.

Not being able to get booted out for the term of your rent without compensation is what you would be paying for.

If the owner attempted to do anything to a parcel that would prevent a tenant from being able to enjoy the term of their lease, the owner would get a dialog requesting authorization to pay the tenant the amount needed to cover the unused rental period. Unless they agreed they would be unable to complete the action. If they did agree the amount would be transferred from owner to tenant automatically.

The simplest way to handle a system that accepted downpayments would be that downpayment refunds areat owner's discretion - therefore people would factor in the risk when determining how large a downpayment they would be willing to pay.

If you rent land in the current system you face the prospect of the sim owner failing to pay their LL bills or selling the island to another owner or just kicking you off. That doesn't stop the current system from being used.

When you buy something now from another user through the interface you face feeling that you didn't get what you paid for - this possiblity doesn't stop the buying system from working ok.

An alternate system of renting land would not have to have to provide an absolute guarantee of not getting ripped off in order to be useful; if such a guarantee was a requirement for a rental system, then the current system wouldn't exist.

This would pretty much guarantee that people would continue to use scripted rental boxes, right there. I've talked to a few estate owners about even *less* stringent power-sharing schemes before and the reaction from some of them... including ones who I don't consider power freaks... is basically that they own the sim, and if they can't kick abusive renters out at their discretion they're not interested.

It's not the renter's opinion of the system that I'm talking about. It's a seller's market, thanks to mainland prices.