Do people live in The Burbs in SL?

The realtor that was doing it was Coldwell Banker and I think they disappeared with SL's media hype.

I have a place over in Avalon Town - it has a great community feel to it. There is an active art district. There are residential areas as well.

That's just great! The pool guy is always the first one sent packing.

It is because you never wash your bucket. I mean . . . really, look at that thing!

Is that the same bucket you cleaned the septic leak with? eww, just eww.

Heh. Well, you've got me there. I don't know about Avion, but Lebettu was a break-even proposition at best.

A themed build (at least, if I'm the builder) takes up about half the available prims. Which leaves half for the tenants and their Stuff. Of course, they have been provided with a house, which reduces their NEED for prims, but it does make for a very different situation.

Full mainland sim, no theme, no infrastucture, just open land.
15,000 prims, $195/mo, 25% vacancy factor. Breakeven is at $L1.04 per prim per week.

Themed sim. 7,500 prims, $195/mo, 25% vacancy factor. Breakeven is at $L2.08 per prim per week.

Not counting premium membership, cost of pre-fabs if any, value of your time, cost of land purchase, or profit. When you factor in those, the empty sim rents for about $L1.60 per prim per week, the themed sim at about $L2.60 or so.

That's our Pool Boy! Where have you been all year???

I probably missed it cause am flying throught the forum on a court break; you wanted to buy a parcel Mickey, or rent a house in a neighborhood?

Whitesun, (and part of Allana, adjoining Whitesun,) has a nice neighborhood of homes lined up in neat parcels, (Allana is where the Forum Hangout is) The rental guy to contact there is Mop Hak. I'm the only one left I think who owns my parcel there, he owns the rest of it or most of the rest of it.

I thought idly for a short while about making something like that. But all around me were empty rental properties...

I ended up buying the parcel to make a halloween carnival instead, and ever since (Halloween ended - November), have been trying to unload it.

That looks like Blue Mars. You better tell those girls to put some clothes on. They're not permitted to have sexy time in BM.

Yep, on an Estate sim it's hard to make it viable, you'll lose quite a bit of land to pavements/roads and Community land.
The upside is that you can offer bonus prims per parcel, but you'll probably need to charge more per parcel than the going market rate to make it break-even. Then your model probably rely on high occupancy rates....and if it ever starts dipping, you'll end up paying a percentage of the SIM Tiers out of your own pocket. Hence why you don't see many Suburbia type estate sims.....which isn't a problem on Linden owned Mainland.(i.e Shemerville) which has lower SIM tiers to begin with, plus Group bonus land

When we had it set up before, Rene....I just had 4 connecting homes on land - they were each a 4096 or larger - so plenty of prims. We were just using the home/land packages that I had up for sale....but then as they started selling....the new owners did not really want to join in with the game. So we fizzled out. I really didn't have the energy to set it all up again....so was looking for something already in place, without about 6 houses to rent.

So yeah....that type set up would be hard to find....simply because it's not feasible financially for someone....but that's kind of a shame....surely some people would enjoy living in a neighborhood type set up.

That, or you stack your estate deep with people. You'd have to make it up on volume somewhere to take advantage of the excess in prims.

I've tried a couple of times to set up a themed community for clients, complete with houses and all shared amenities already in place. One was a beautiful tropical resort, with a community-shared pool that even had water slides, and a pretty little marina for boating and surfing.

We could never get enough tenants to make it work.

We tried revising the idea, making it optional to keep the provided home and basic furnishings. A few more bought in, and immediately deleted the buildings, returned every last fern and palm tree, and built new homes that may, or may not, fit the theme at all.

What I observed in general was that most people buying land in SL have their own very particular ideas about what they want - and if they have an option to delete the entire parcel's contents and start over from scratch, it's very likely that they will do so.

Shermville "works" bacause the Lindens own it, they set it up as double-prim land (as I recall), and their actual cost to operate those sims is NOT what they charge a resident to cover a month of Mainland tier. They can afford to have a far lower occupancy rate, and still make money on both tier and land sales. Same goes for Bay City and Nautilus City.

I think if I were to even attempt to design a "suburbia" sim, I'd probably try it first on a full Mainland sim, where I had lower tier per month, and see what I could manage with the developer owning the streets, sidewalks and alleys, and offering 2048 M2 parcels that allowed joining to make bigger areas, but where at most you might have 8 to 12 of these "lots" on a single "city block". Maybe it could be made to work. Maybe.

It might actually fly better in Zindra, where any activities (such as the aforementioned swinging suburbia, with the pool boy and gardner and plumber et all as "part of the playtime" could do their thing beside the pool, or on the lawn, without having to hide in a home or skybox, or limit access to specific residents.

Otherwise, I'd look at trying it on a Private Island sim, and arrange it to allow double-primmed 2048 parcels. You'd have full control on the theme and the sim rating, which would be a plus. And if you advertized the heck out of it, you might make it break even at 75% occupancy, and still keep parcel purchase and montyhly tier reasonable. Maybe.

I don't have funds to back a full-sim land development venture. So I won't waste my time designing these things in detail unless I have a paying client who wants me to do it for them. But if Micky or someone else wants to discuss a deal for designing and planning such a development, I could likely design some really nice areas. The question would be, could the sim owner advertise it well enough and keep it occupied full enough to be viable?".

Without getting into details too much... yes, it's viable.

At least one region; two or three would be better. Megaprim construction. Fixed, pre~designed housing (yes, I'm serious). Enforced limits on how many prims, because one resident will always want to buy out 3/4 of the neighbourhood and then wonder where the neighbours went.

Ultra~critically: fixed vegetation. The first thing most residents do is strip out all the trees, so they can have stuff in a skybox... many communities have been turned into unappealing skybox ghettos this way, they would have been better with bare ground down below.

In addition you'll need a well known land baron fronting it, connexions to other destinations by road or water, and so forth. Location is a big deal.

Key to the whole thing: a critical mass of residents chatting on a group channel, who all kinda know each other.

Would I ever do anything like this?

Nah, I doubt it. Not quite my style.

Ceera - I didn't want to develop a whole sim either. It just happened to work the last time, by accident, because I had done too many homes at once, and they were sitting there unused, waiting to sell....so we used them.

We didn't even have to have streets - they were connected with bridges over water canals, and they were all on the beach. So each home was furnished to the max, with pools and landscaping. The game worked, because there was rarely anyone else around on the rest of the sim.....so we didn't bother anyone.

Your example above sounds lovely. In our case, it would be best to rent from someone, because the roleplay members come and go....and no one really wants to get tied down with land ownership.

I'm not sure why it is so hard to keep one of these communities running. I have visited a ton of places this week....and none of them were done up very good. The ones I visited from this thread, were much better. But I relied on the Search tool with some key phrases....and I think that some really good offerings might be missing the boat on their use of the search tools.

Plus...most of these people I am bringing....are in the same group now. So if someone out there has an empty community....they could probably fill half of it up, by promoting it to certain groups. I think that some of it has to do with keeping the marketing and promotion going.

Oh come on. Surely not everyone in your Hood wears a Nun's Habit.

It's crossed my mind to do a few different things, but I've also got this huge responsibility to my main gig, and that's partly what stops me. I don't want to mess it up.

Expanding to two platforms has been fairly challenging also, and I *do* have more stuff in the works (both here and there) that isn't public yet. Sadly it's not a modern suburbia sort of thing.

From the sound of it, a homestead region might make all this work. It's just ridiculous how much mileage one can get out of a few sculpty prims these days, and the homestead will give you the space and keep the costs down.

With costs limited like that, it might be the sort of thing were everyone says, "okay, 10 people, 100 bucks a month, everyone pay ten"

I'd gently recommend Charlene Trudeau perhaps; of the Skybeam estates, it's contemporary. Say Des sent you. It might be exactly what you are looking for, and if you bring in ten people I am sure she would work with you.

OMG, I popped in to Shermerville yesterday and totally fell in LOVE with the place! I begged my partner to purchase a parcel, but the prices were OUTRAGEOUS! ($75L per sqm!!!). If anyone finds another sim set up like that, PLEASE post it.

Um, you know what, gang? We HAVE this.

If it weren't for the fact that most of us already have places to live, and the fact that we are so diverse that I don't think a single theme would come close to satisfying everyone, I'd say...

"I know! We'll put up a SIM!"

What the heck, I'll say it anyway. I have a half sim, and can purchase another 1/4. Terrain is about 1/3 land, 2/3 water, bordering on Linden Ocean. If y'all can come up with a consensus on a theme, I'll seriously consider it.

Des...how do you make plants permanent? Mine always turn brown and die.

That's a human ear all right.

Wow! I just toured all these places. Great recommendations. Thanks!

I'm going to take my horse back for a ride through Avalon Town and Skybeam - - these roads stretch on forever, and there are some pretty places!

Liome was awesome if you want to hang out in the city.....and Old New York, the Brooklyn Bridge - awesome! Are these places in Showcase? I do showcase tours all the time - and have not run across these. If they are not listed in Showcase - something is wrong here!

I wish there was a better way to see places like this, and know about places like this. I'm not sure what the answer is - except to come in here, and work your way through a thread like this - - but surely there is a better way for these places to get some publicity.

You can submit a photo and LM of your place to the Emerald team at Modular Systems. I don't know what their selection process is, but if you get picked, your photo appears on the login screen and the user can tp to your location right from there.

Sounds wonderful, Lindal. I'm not in need of a rental (I never stay 'home' long enough to do anything except change - maybe watch tv for ten minutes) but my vote would be for mid-century Americana, or, something "mediterranean" (I love those blue or orange tiles.) I'd happily go to events there though, and I think you'd be great at organising/managing such a community.

Is that just for those who use Emerald though? I want these places featured on the main SL log in!

Does someone have a blog that features residential properties - neighborhoods - communities? All on one blog? Why don't we have a tool in place that narrows it down to the truly Best Places - without all the crap thrown in?