1.12 Estate Land Sales - Thoughts & Proposals

The new estate features of 1.12 are promising, at first glance. When I started looking into it more, and found out that renters would still be required to pay tier to the estate owner (in an unreliable, unsecured, and unprotected way) rather than to Linden Labs, I realized these tools were only introduced to benefit the current system, but the current system lacks a lot of things.

I drew up two proposals below, both of which would create a new and exciting way of which estate land is rented or sold. Benefiting everyone from Linden Labs, estate owners, and the land renters & buyers of Second Life.


Proposal #1. Allow estate owners to choose whether buyers of parcels in a region are to pay tier to Linden Labs as is done with mainland regions, or require the buyer to agree to the estate owners individual tier plan as Anshe is currently doing. Estate owners will then only pay tier for the amount of land they still own in that region.

Proposal #2. Allow estate owners to choose whether renters of parcels in a region are to rent their parcel in L$ or USD which will be automatically deducted from the renters Second Life account monthly. When it is time for renewal the renter will be presented with an option to renew their lease, or release the land back to the estate owner. Estate owners should also be able to determine the rental fees (possibly based on USD amount) per square meter, or per individual parcel.

Linden Labs doesn't currently have the time to manage and enforce the rules and regulations in a zoned community, so they are unable to compete with the appeal of renting on an estate sim. We all know how messy the mainland can get, and this is one of the main reasons why estate sims have become so successful. With the proposed features simplifying the process for both estate owners and renters, Linden Labs will benefit from the increase in estate managers and renters.

Current estate owners and future estate owners will benefit from the simplified task of being a landlord - allowing more time to devote to the care and maintenance of regions, as well a more committed customer service experience.

Common renters/buyers of land in Second Life will benefit from the increased protection and security of owning/renting land in an estate sim, as well as the simplified process of purchasing/renting/renewing/canceling land.

Possibly both proposals could be combined, although my personal preference is proposal #2. With a little bit of help and contribution from the community towards ideas and suggestions, I am confident that something similar to my proposals could be introduced into Second Life. Comments and suggestions, openly welcomed

Both of these are great ideas. I would definately vote for these.

They solve :
1) the unnecessary effort in someone paying you, just so you can use that money to pay SL (especially as paypal / L$-selling fees make it cost both time *and* money).
2) the unnecessary effort in having to manually check up on residents' payments... there should be an automatic "debit owner of this parcel X USD or L per month until they abandon it (or sell it if the region allows land sales)".
3) the unnecessary effort of having to explain to every newbie that rents land on islands that they do NOT have to pay tier to LL to do this.

Combined with the "allow land in private estates to be sold by its owner" which is in the upcoming preview, this will make being a landlord on a private sim MUCH easier.

There are a few other things, though, that would be nice :
1) listing of parcels for sale on island sims under find -> land sales (is this already planned?)
2) a panel showing exactly who rents/owns which bits of a sim, how much they pay per month and when their next bill date is. Currently, island owners have to track all this information themselves and it adds significantly to overheads to do all the administration of records.

I'm adding this topic to my list of "good ideas that deserve more Linden attention".

The thing with this idea is that it will trigger the need to have a simple roles-based permission system for estate 'managers'.
After all, you don't want all estate managers being able to cancel tennants' leases, kick them out, or change their fees.... but you might want some of them able to set parcels owned by the sim owner up for sale.
Maybe you just want to give a few friends 'ban/unban' access to your sim, and handle all the financial stuff yourself?

I suggested something akin to Proposal #2 in this thread.

Prokofy soundly thrashed the proposal here.

I still think it's a good idea.

Shameless bump. This topic needs more attention.

The potential disaster Proposal #1 imposes is an estate owner accumulating growing sm of land that nobody wants as is happening now on the Linden's central and northern estates.

As rare as these moments are, I personally agree with Prokofy - I want the flexibility.

LL hasnt got much of a good track record with implementing features to allow maximum flexibility. For instance - how would you handle refunds, free time, discounts, etc in this system? We make regular use of those kind of things currently; to do it through yet-another-middleman makes it more complex, not less.

Now, LL acting as a pure payment gateway - that would be fine, but tying it up more than that's going to act as a barrier to development - LL doesnt have the time nor resources to implement everyone's personal customisation. Personally - I'd like better UI tools, let us make things easy to end users - and at the same time, preserve the flexibility of doing it yourself.

The current scripted UI's we can develop with right now are abysmal. Horrible. They are both confusing, and narrow. Tried doing text input into a script? It's just about impossible. HUD's would be nice - but we cant attach them onto someone automatically when they click on a sign - and getting input from a user into a form field is again, painful.

In my opinion, 1.12 is going to open some more interesting challenges - but I suggest seeing what people do with the new features before suggesting any major changes like this. If there is a problem - let's fix it, but it is at least guarunteed to be better than it is now.

I'd prefer we solve the heart of the problem - too much in SL, is too confusing - and better interaction options in SL for scripts and services would go a long way to helping that.

-Adam

Absolutely agree with this.

Another shameless bump for a topic that deserves more notice.

Proposal 3: Give estate owners the choice as to whether estate managers have the keys to the safe or not. As things are planned now, any estate manager will be able to enable/disable land transfers in the sim. For those of us who would like to share access to features like land textures, sim dubug, and sim access, (as I do currently), as of 1.12 we will only be able to do so by also giving them the ability to enable land transfer, and therefore 'sell' land in the sim.

Proposal 3: Give Estate Owners the choice as to whether or not Estate Managers have the keys to the safe.

Currently, Estate Owners can pass over access to things such as sim debug, land textures, and sim access/ban lists, by making them an Estate Manager. Until now, that's all estate manager can do, yhey can not deed/undeed land to/from group, etc. As of 1.12, Estate Managers will be able to enable land 'sales' in the sim, and will therefore be able to 'sell' land in the estate owners sims. This is a great new feature, as long as it is optional. Please LL, give us the choice.