Group Land Transfer Question

Since SL apparently doesn't allow you to rename a group, for reasons I don't want to explain, I'd like to create a new group with the same officers as an existing group, and then transfer land ownership from the existing group to the new one (along with the existing land contributions from the officers).

My concern is that if you exceed a tier, Linden instantaneously puts you in-queue to be billed for the excess even if left in that state for a few seconds. (Smart business move on their part -- a little unfair to customer IMHO).

The question is how do I transfer ownership AND land contributions per-officer from one group to another without causing any member's tier to go up? Is there even a way?

Feature suggestion #12,171 -- allowing renaming of groups, and then all this is a non-issue!

You can temporary have a group on negative tier. So what you can do is, have all who contiribute tier move their tier to the new group (prefarable within a short period). This make the old group have 0sqm contributed tier and the new group have all tier. ( it will warn you about the old group beeing on negative)
Then sell the land for 0 to one officer, who then buys it for the new group.

How long can your group go negative before there's a problem? Is this calculated daily? How long do you have to get all the group members together to resolve it?

What I've been doing is sell the land in "strips" small enough that they never went negative, and transferring tier in bits. This is obviously less than ideal.

Therein lies the rub I think. The last time I had an officer buy land for the group, it IMMEDIATELY exceed the officer's tier, and pushed him (me) into a higher tier, and I got dinged for the higher tier for the month. Perhaps I did the transaction wrong.

It's this specific area where I need some additional detail -- preferably in a step by step format if someone has it.

It seems in these transactions, there's about 10 steps, and if you do even one thing wrong along the way, Linden will make sure you get billed accordingly. I don't begrudge them their desire to make a buck, it just seems this is really difficult, really error-prone, and there's a stiff penalty if you do it wrong -- innocently or otherwise.

First, everyone in your group must change the old groups contribution to 0, then as soon as thats done, you set the land for sale to either yourself, or another group officer from the new group. When you set the old groups contribution, it won't count you as having twice the amount of land. If you can't all do it at once, then only sell off small pieces to yourself (new group) as each group owner is able to change the contribution, but there is the risk that something will add up a little differen't that way, so best if all the members do it at once

I think I'm homing-in on what I did wrong last time... I bought the land personally, then immediately deeded it to the group, which would have (logically) pushed my tier up.

I don't have SL open right now to look at the exact dialogs, but I don't recall seeing an option to explicitly buy land for your group, and essentially buy it and deed it in a single transaction. I must certainly be missing something obvious.

Or, is the technique literally to chop the land back up into 512 m² pieces and move them one at a time?

Again, unless I'm missing something, I don't see a way that I can sell a 2,048 m² patch of land in this scenario without raising the tier of the person actually undertaking the transaction on behalf of the group.

Yes, that option's in there.