No payment info residents can't own land?

I was a bit confused yesterday while trying to rent a parcel out on my Island. The purchaser couldn't buy the parcel and was getting a message that they had to enter credit card info on Linden Labs website. I have always been under the impression that estate land could be owned by anyone as the Tier is being paid to me as estate owner, not to Linden Lab. Is this normal, or is something broken? The person is in Europe and doesn't have any type of credit card that Linden Lab supports. Thanks in advance for your help.

Presumably they didn't have enough L$ in their account to purchase the land. When you buy land without enough L$ it tells you how many you need etc, but of course you will need credit info on file to be able to buy them in game.

Do they have a Paypal account?

No, they had plenty of Lindens. After pressing "Buy Land.." they were informed that they had to have payment info on file to complete the transaction. and were then sent to the website where they were prompted to put in credit card info. This isnt how I remember this working. It was my impression that NPI people could own estate land.

It's resolved however, she had a friend with payment ifo buy it and deed it to her group. But I'd still like to know if this new policy or a bug, as I'm sure I will encounter this situation again.

Owning Land is about the ONLY thing that separates pay accounts from free ones... As for Estate land, i believe there may be something wrong.

Or something right..

I think I may know why it's been done like that.
The "show in Search -> Places" option costs L$30/week. If someone without payment info on file was to tick that, and not have any L$ in their account, LL would not get their money.
If this is the case though, I don't see why it simply couldn't be removed as an option for those with payment info.

It is a bug. If you don't have payment info on file you are supposed to be able to still own estate land. When they first went over to allowing the ownership of land to people is when this bug first came up. For a while it was fixed, but now every so often it pops back up. File a bug report on it, and have the renter form a group, if possible, to own the land. That should allow you to get around it.

Hmm, that very well could have something to do with it, I'll have to experiment. Thanks for the tip.

Yes, that's what I suspected. Thanks for the advice.

You seem to be implicitly assuming somewhere here that if you have to pay a L$ recurring cost, and you don't have the L$ in the account, then the necessary L$ are automatically purchased on your credit card. That isn't true at all. If you can't afford a listing fee, you just don't get your parcel listed in the directory for that week.

I'm going through my issue queue; just wanted to confirm that what's described here specifically in regards to estates is a high-priority bug we intend to fix. Expected behavior is: a Resident with no payment info should be able to purchase, and own land on estates (private islands). These are Resident-to-Resident transactions which don't require you to hold tier (as is the case on the Mainland).

Internal issue ID is SL-34631 which I've linked to this thread, and if anyone uses our Public Issue Tracker to report the same thing (I didn't see it in there already), feel free to state that as the "Linden Lab Issue ID". Thanks.

Internal fix for this was just done; will hopefully roll out live soon.

No assumptions, it was just a thought as to what could be the cause.
That's why I said it may be the cause, and "if this is the case"

Well I guess that just about covers the flybys and speculation

Nice! Yes, that fixes the described issue. Nice work