Survey: Who would want live in a zoned sim managed by Anshe?

This is serious question, so please no stupid flame or such.

It has come up several times that people don't like clubs, malls or whatever ugly thing in neighbourhood.

Well, I could provide zoning. I have one new mainland sim, Midge, that I could run as zoned sim if enough people are interested. I could make profit through tier arbitrage while you would not pay much more (or even less in some cases) than if you would pay tier to Linden Lab.

I could either rent out land for 400 L$ per 1024sqm per week, or sell it. In case of selling I would have to hold the land as trustee though and you would pay land tier to me instead of Linden Lab - as to be able enforce zoning rules.

If you want live in sim zoned that way, maybe can post here Or send me IM if this thread goes down the drain

A nice quiet suburban residential area? For the right price I endorse this product and/or suggestion.

Hi Anshe, I would definitely not mind living in a sim managed by you.
But, I would like to have control over my land, and I dont want to pay rent.
Also, it would really depend on who the neighbors are and what the specific rules would be regarding the look of builds, and stuff.

What about building five or six nice white houses and gardens, and letting people select which one they want on their plot. Then people who like the whole look of it can move in.

I would never live in a prefab

I would live in a zoned sim, and I would pay tier rent, but I'd want the agreement to include my right to re-rent for Lindens or Paypal.

I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that you have to take over tier, though. I guess I don't expect that the people who come in and agree to keep a sim zoned, who are highly motivated to have a sim zoned, are going to be the people that will suddenly screw you and build a laggy club on you. But you have the experience in dealing with volumes, so maybe you are right to assume that people will do their worst, even after promises.

That would be rather bland wouldn't it?
I mean you can't 'live' in the houses, AV's don't eat, drink, or sleep.
Would the neighbors get up in arms if you decided to build a sculpture on your front lawn?

If it's a static area, what is the draw to it? Those that are linden sponsored/built have sort of died off as people create their own areas.

Now a themed sim on the other hand, allows for some creativity within the overall idea.

I would "live" in a quasi-zoned sim...

What I mean is that it would basically allow anything, as long as it wasn't horrifically ugly or REALLY broke up things.

(Note: The generally accepted form of ugly. Don't go off on a tirade about beauty being inthe eye of the beholder, please.)

Anshe, I am not interested in living in a sim which is managed for-profit by another resident.

This is nothing against you; if I were willing to do something like that, you are one of the few business people that I would trust with my money.

If there were someone who were managing/owning a sim and renting it out, AND passing along their VERY NOTICEABLE tier savings (for owning an entire sim) to the renters with say only a 10%-20% markup from the tier that they themselves are paying, I would probably be very interested. Such a proposition could also be made self-managing, by creating a different group for each sim that is being managed this way, and promoting one of the residents to act as a superintendant and manage things like trash cleanup or zoning enforcement.

One of the biggest problems in trying to manage such an endeavor for-profit, is the inherent mistrust that your business activities will generate among others. You could be a very honest, forthright business person, but the fact that you are acting for-profit will always tend to itch at the necks of your prospective customers. Example: "Why am I paying the same amount of tier to her as I'd pay to Linden Labs? She isn't paying nearly that much for the land, she's getting nearly a %50 discount for owning a sim entire. And the moment I leave, the land is still hers; I can't reclaim any of the rent or sell it on to a friend or other person." A system that encourages personal ownership, or something close to it, of the property will be much more likely to meet with success.

I'll give you a business idea, free of charge, because I think that you're one of the few businesspeople in SL who has the venture capital and integrity to carry it off.

On anshechung.com, set up a new service. Set up a forum in there where people can sign up and look for potential other group members to go in on a sim together. Example: "Looking for people who want to re-create an ancient roman villa", or "looking for a group who just wants to live in a relatively lag-fee, club-free, mall-free sim." Set up an easy-to-read setup guide, FAQ, explaining how the 65,000 m of land all has to be accounted for before you can step in. Once a group has "critical mass", enough members to populate the sim and enough tier ready to donate, they wait for a sim to come up at auction and decide if it meets their requirements. If it does, they ask you to step in and bid on it for them, up to a certain amount. Whatever the final bidding price is, you tack on your management fee of perhaps $50 or $100, or say 5% or 10%. The group members divide up the final price according to the sized parcels they want, and pay you for them. You then set up the sim according to their wishes, promote 1-3 of them to group officers, and leave the group.

The idea is discussed in slightly more detail here.

If you serve as broker for these people instead of landlord, you'll not only reduce the amount of time and energy you have to spend on each sim, you'll gain their respect and gratitude aside from their money. Granted, you will be earning a one-time fee instead of continuing rent, but I have a feeling that "Anshe Chung" the avatar is reaching a point where her puppetmistress doesn't have enough hours in the day to keep up with the various business dealings required of her.

By setting it up as a self-serve kind of idea, all you have to advertise is the service itself. You will not have to advertise for the various groups in your website's forums looking for more members in order to bid on a sim. That job is for the interested group members to do. If they want you to bid on a sim for them, they have to gather enough members first.

If you are serving as real-estate broker for reasonable prices, you can also reduce the amount of competition on the auction block. If you are bidding for a group instead of against them, the overall price of the sim is likely to be lower.

This is brilliant.

If you do this Anshe, I'll be your first customer. I feel this kind of brokerage is a much-needed service -- one I'd be willing to pay for.

~Ulrika~

Your basic idea makes sense. I-d go for it if there were better land management tools (i.e. I could have a dependable contract in place, and you couldn't just pull the rug out one day).

As for the other idea, nah, let's just get the Lindens to start selling sudivisible sims on demand. I've worked with a couple of large landowning groups now, and frankly they need a few weeks of lead time to make a deal as large as a sim. Single buyers will always have the advantage in the auctions. For groups to get a sim together I'd rather just buy from the Lindens than be forced to work through Anshe.

Ananda, if you do get a group together, anshe will be causing you to pay more regardless of whether she is your broker, through her own bidding activities. If you motivate her to profit from you at a reasonable rate, her activities can work for you rather than against you. Granted, it could be said that you might not wish to support her business plans at all, but if she is rendering an actual service, at a reasonable rate.......

Which is why I'd rather the Lindens sold wholesale sims on demand. What you are calling a service I call taking advantage of an inequity in the system.

since anshe has been so nice as to open an ambigious ad slash commerce land query thread in the general forum ..

i am already running a similar setup in Larsen (mature snow sim) for anyone interested. IM me.

they do this. they are called island sims. and similar landlording is taking place there too.

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I'm in. Sounds like a great idea.

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That's not cute, not funny, and not clever. In fact, it's an insult directed at Anshe.

How so? Im just asking what kind of surburbia she is planning. Like mr rogers neighboorhood or south central los angelos?

Jauani, you know me. I'm not a complete idiot. The auction system is a big reason why there are so many islands, but they are not the same thing. An island can only be owned whole, undivisible, by a single account. What I want to see is wholesale sims. Or to put it more bluntly, I want to see an end to the auctions as the main method of distributing land.

i know you ananda . i assumed you would have realized that such a suggestion would be an increased margin for resale to smaller parcel owners and a discount price for large land owners. it would be a wonderful way for everyone with $$$ to get in on the land resale game without taking the risk, competing on the auctions, or having any wit, and at the detriment of maintaining community's faith in the land market.

wholesale sims would work if we picked up on the idea robin brought forward a few months ago which LF picked up on this week again, wherein LL would sell all land as wholesale sims and let resellers develop road works, protected waterways, and parcelling. to me, it's an all or nothing scenario to remain equitable.

i disagree that islands sims are simply a reaction to auction prices. they provide a versatility for developers that is unavailable to gridded land. i image in the future we will see very large island sim developments for games within the game that could contend with the grid.

until LL puts land development into the hands of a player development, everyone should be willing to bid market price for land.

I'm not in the mood to repeat the whole concept, so I'll just add this old link:

Sim Space Reservation

My main interest here is in destroying the auctions as the means of distributing land. They are divisive, painful, and create a false sense of value by means of an artificial scarcity. They are the playground of a few who care more for money than for the creation of actual neighborhoods. My secondary interest here is in destroying the unfair advantages given to those with the cash to drop on a whole sim all at once, and maintain ownership of it.

I disagree with your analysis. If players are able to simply buy land from the Lindens at real cost, resellers will only be able to make a profit by doing a better job than the Lindens have at parceling up the land and developing scenic areas. Otherwise, we can just go buy more land elsewhere. Resellers will not be able to make any profits unless they actually improve the product. Groups that simply want to live together will not have to compete with the resellers to get access to new land. They would simply order it up.

Resellers could still make a profit, but it would be in the secondary land market, working as brokers. Because anyone would know the set price the Lindens charge for land, no one would be able to get a higher sale price unless the land had real value to it. Places in degraded sims could be bought cheaply, and redeveloped into nicer areas.

No more Linden subsidizing of resellers. Kill the auctions.

ananda, the problems i have with this idea and how it would negatively affect me as an end user of land:

a> i want to buy 2048 m2 of land. where do i buy it? (or perhaps your price list is intended to go right down to 16m2 - not sure on your intentions there)

b> i don't want warped rocky land. i want a flat beach. how does this system respond to the differing value for different geography

c> i want to be close to the hub. how do you account for this value difference.

d> i want that land right there next to my friend and i will pay anything it takes!

e> i need 40 more prims and the sim is full.

LL accounts for these REAL - LIVED - SUBJECTIVE differences in land, something an exclusively rational- objective - abstract model cannot account for. to make it fair, all players can openly bid on the auctions whereas in your system it's the luck of your wholesale draw what you grabbed, and then your group can figh over it.

there is another scenario in which i can see the land market falling out of LL hands, which is if the game scales up to a million users, possibly LL will be licensing out the architecture (and anshe and bedazzle will each be running their own grids). in which case your system sounds great - price per sim license, and the 2nd party would develop the land starting from the terrain map.

you can't think of land simply as some abstract server resource. it just doesn't work that way. the price of land is what it is regardless of resellers. the price of land is determined by endusers who are willing to pay more for prime realestate and convenience, very much like real life land.

i love the ideas of fantasy landscapes, btw. a lunar or martian landscape has been brewing in my mind ever since i saw what az did for that desert island sim.

Ananda, I'm amazed we haven't talked in the past. I am in complete agreement with you on this subject. I've actually been thinking the same thing but had not yet discussed it in the forums.

We should put our heads together and propose some improvements to the system.

~Ulrika~

Anshe,

Would you be willing to rent-to-own? For instance, say a group wanted to purchase a whole sim but didn't have the money. Could they pay full-tier plus commission, while they slowly purchased parcels of the land for themselves? That would be a profoundly valuable service.

~Ulrika~