Land Purchase versus the Inconsiderate Neighbour

As a relative (truthfully..extremely) newbie you're probably going to tell me this point of discussion has been posted a dozen times before, sigh and mutter "good grief not again" then refer me to reams of archive postings...however, here goes.

Like most residents I've developed a hankering to acquire some virtual land, I've been patient - after all $50 doesn't buy you much - so I've waited till my limits extend to $150, and armed with the freshly converted 40000 Lindens I've gone in search of my perfect plot. It doesn't take long to find, nestling on one side of a rolling hillside the view down the valley looks out to sea...stunning!! Sensibly I wait till the next day, giving myself time to think about the purchase..is this really the perfect plot?

I suspect many readers are smiling to themselves..."he's so naive isn't he.."

The following day that stunning scene, those rolling hills, that view down the valley looking out to sea had acquired a few..shall we say 'additional features'. To the right I see a stack of 'cubes' resembling three giant shoe boxes, the walls facing my (prospective)plot still in their 'primitive beach wood effect' and I suspect likely to remain so. To the left a brick wall, so high the hills are no longer visible, extends from the horizon all the way up the valley to and beyond my plot. Now I'm looking down a corridor bounded by hideous architecture and concrete boundaries, I really don't want to look behind me, I dread to think what's been built there, it's probably pink with flashing neon lights...I teleport out of there....fast!!! (and in doing so the land seller kisses his 40K goodbye).

That was some time ago, since then I've searched in vain, each perfect plot I find ultimately being tainted by some inconsiderate neighbour erecting some hideous monolithic creation (why is it that the people that have no architectural or design skills what-so-ever insist on building such 'huge' structures) . So I come to the conclusion that there really is only one (well two actually) ways to avoid this predicament. Either you buy yourself an island, or you hang onto your cash till you can afford to acquire that perfect plot and 'all' the neighbouring plots.

So I find myself asking a number of related questions..

Are there building regulations in existence here in SL..and if not, shouldn't here be..?

You buy a plot..a neighbour erects some monstrosity..as a consequence the value of your property drops through the floor ..can you do something about it..?

Your neighbour erects some hideous monstrosity..you sell your land for a fraction of it's value..your neighbour buys it..suspicious..?

I refuse to believe I'm the first to come up against this problem..so go on then list all those archive references...

This just might be the first of a 'few' postings....

Perre Anadine

Contact Kandee Herrey, Sarah Nerd, Rockwell Ginsberg or Steve Mahfouz inworld. They are reputable estate owners with no eyesore policies. What you are looking for does exist, just very very rare to find unspoiled sims (like Carlisle where I am fortunate to own land) on the mainland anymore. They all have covenants with various building codes. Good luck!

My first land purchase was perfect. For a week. Then the casinos moved into the previously unspoiled land.

My second purchase is better - it is where we have Creek Side Shops, so we are more than happy to have other shops around and, with the exception of one really annoying neighbor, everything is low key.

My third purchase is my dream purchase - and yes, I'm knocking on wood as I type that. We built Ebon Rih in an area with mostly residences and very friendly neighbors, with a HOA of sorts (no covenant, but it helps to keep an eye on things).

So it IS possible to find what you're looking for. It just takes time, experience and more than a little of the SL gods smiling on you.

Find a private estate with a covenant that includes building restrictions...height, walls etc.
Tho this might restrict what you can build it also restricts what your neighbours can build. And remember, with everything....you only get what you pay for, check the services provided by the estate owner, are they on hand to help out with any problems etc. Many places are just land farms they take your money and do nothing until your fees are due.

I have a small plot of land next to me with ugly for sale signs that has been for sale at a ridiculously high price for 6 months - I mean 10 times market value! I even contacted the owner about making an offer but they replied that they were confident they'd get their price eventually as the market is rising (!!!!!LOL)

Nevertheless, it's true that one can do more or less what one likes with one's land and this person is doing nothing wrong - in fact they owned the land before I bought mine.

1) Not really and No. Giving you the freedom to build anything you like means giving the idiots next door the ability to build anything they like. That's a selling point and a detraction on the mainland. Sadly, it's packaged together with the only way to truly "own" your land in the eyes of Linden Labs. Choose carefully, consider options and accept when you cannot change things (namely, your neighbors.). I have add plots surrounding my land on 2 sides. The third side is still for sale, but the fourth is linden protected land. If you really want a view of the ocean or a bit of space from your neighbors, your best bet is to look for ocean front property or property near roads. With 40k$L you should have a nice choice of plots, my 512 bordering the road only cost me 5600. I'd be on the ocean if I had my choice (unrestricted views across water on one side are quite nice) but I don't really have the cash to buy a nice ocean front property that isn't fully/mostly under water =/

2) Politely IM them is your only option.... and after a certain point you simply have to give up or wind up with them reporting you for harassment. Their land their property their choice.

3) Suspicious or not, that's the way it works.

My suggestions-

1) Look into estates if you're fine with limited ownership. They often have building codes.
2) If you want a view of the ocean- build on the ocean with linden owned sea bordering your land. (Be wary, some sims have fully/mostly underwater plots and people can build anything they want on this, including their own hideous island or tower in the middle of the ocean.)
3) Buy in an established neighborhood, if there's already a solid community of long term owners who keep their property neat and attractive, it's a good bet that they will keep it that way. No guarantees, but it evens the odds out in your favor.

I just took the chance and bought in a newer sim with the ad farms around- I'll probably have to sell out later or build a skybox, but it's home and it was at the right price.

There are unspoiled sims on the mainland and new ones too that at the moment the ad farmers haven't attacked. I have land there, however I fear who will buy the rest of the land around me as at the moment I can't afford to buy it.

If you want a nice ocean view on the mainland, then you have to buy land ( Edit: "land" being a plot - which might or not have some proportion of its ground beneath Linden water level) that goes right to the edge of the continent.
I've seen 'nice hillside plots with an ocean view' that had huge towers sitting on the water in front of them - and ad farms! The towers had nice view though.
I've seen ocean sims that have effectively been turned into land. It doesn't matter if it's fully/mostly under water. People just put their prims at whatever level suits them.

And then, when you buy right on the edge of the continent, all it takes is for LL to add a row of water sims to the edge - and bingo! Your ocean is gone.

It seems odd to me that the ugliest parts of the mainland tend to be along the shoreline. One would think that the higher L$/sq.m. commanded by those parcels would encourage more creative and appealing builds, but they're rare and usually sandwiched between, uh, "markedly less successful expressions of creativity." I just wonder why the shoreline is such a blight-magnet.

Some mainland sims seem to mature into something like "respectability"... but the prices there are usually higher (duh!) and lot sizes generally larger, compared to neighboring sims that aged less gracefully. Of course, new mainland sims are a free-for-all till there's been enough time for some consolidation of ownership and coordination among owners.

It's also puzzling to me that new ad farms continue to spring up while at the same time others are selling-off for pennies per sq.m. This "industry" has suspect economics at best.

Most private estate sims have very strict building regulations, as well as specific Residential and Commercial zoning rules. I'd advise looking at one of them instead of the mainland. Somewhere like Azure Islands for example (there are lots of others too, Azure Islands was just the only one I could remember at the moment) has protected areas that will never be built on in the form of roads, canals and public "parks" in a sense.

"Inconsiderate neighbors" are typically those persons who feel they should have a right to interfere with what's happening on someone else's parcel.

Search for a sim with only the one block for sale, the more roads & water in the sim the fewer neighbours too and less laggy the sim as it should never reach high load levels. Look for neighbouring blocks owned by long term residents. Some like in my sim probably haven't logged into SL for years. The bad side of this is no extra land ever becomes available in my sim

This is pretty much the way I feel too. But it's rather nice to see that some of them are shops catering that could draw attention to my shop. I just wish the club next door had removed their wall, or that I could afford the land near me.

I've found that waiting it out helps. Usually, the owners around you are premiums who after about six months never log in again or pay their accounts and the land goes to the Guv.

To the OP -- your original question has yielded a lot of discussion in the past. One such thread resulted in these proposed solutions: /327/cd/172618/1.html

Based on that discussion, I went ahead and purchased at first one mainland sim (Linji), then a second (Peronaut), and rented parcels under a covenant to prevent eyesores but otherwise allow as much freedom as possible (http://slged.blogspot.com/2007/06/mainland-sim-rental-charters.html).

Both sims are at 100% capacity as of a few days ago.

The problem is that it's still mainland -- i.e., the neighboring sims still have giant towers and rotating signs. But, with builds facing "inwards", you can avoid too much of the outside views. I think both sims are quite pretty, and people in neighboring sims have thanked us for keeping their own property values higher.

(Even better would be with private islands, but with the increased monthly cost of private island fees, I wouldn't be able to maintain my current L$195 / 512 sqm / week, 117 prims, rates. But, an old fee private island would be SO nice, with no neighboring sims to worry about...)

Perhaps more of these mainland cooperatives could be formed.

Drop by Linji and Peronaut sims to take a peek some time I'm quite pleased with how it's all turning out.

I think there some really good suggestions in this thread to help avoid the nasty neighbor syndrome. Stuff like buying land that comes up for sale in already built up sims, buying land with linden frontage, and also buying enough land so that your neighbors monstrosity will never be close to you are all great tips.
When i bought protected waterfront recently, I knew i'd never be able to prevent the neighbors from building ugly stuff behind my lot cuz that was already sold, so instead i bought up all the little waterfront lots on either side of me as a buffer zone... seems to have worked out nicely. They can build whatever trash they like now as it can only affect the view on the one side facing the land that i dont care about lol.

While land on a private sim might mean that you won't get obvious eyesores (not all sim owners are equally caring about this), it doesn't mean your neighbour won't put up something that is in your eyes is questionable and intolerable to live next to.

If you really have a very particular taste (nothing wrong with that ) you might be better off with a rather strictly enforced building stipulation, where the house/structure has to be approved by the sim owner in order to stay around. In this case, just find a sim owner with a taste similar to your own.

Lastly, don't fall into the trap thinking that buying land on a private estate gives you any more rights than a pure rental does, it's simply not true as long as you end up with the land in your name, or deeded to a group you own. You can get kicked out with your land reclaimed for any reason in both cases; buying simply means you have more to loose.

welcome to the mainland
reason i just orderd an island and moved out of the junkyard...

for 40k u`d get about 5600sqm on an island, 6144sqm u need about 43622L$ and a monthly tier of36$


very true, i`d suggest to hop around estates and see where u`d want to live and see if there`s some room

One thing I've done on the mainland: buy up neighboring parcels or a much larger parcel than you need (or can really afford), subdivide to form a perimeter of 512s, and deed them to a separate group for each parcel with yourself and an alt as Group Owners, then rent them out just to cover tier to renters with Group roles adequate to mostly self-manage, but requiring that all building be above 250m. Having separate groups means that renters are responsible for their own prims, etc., and can enjoy near-ownership flexibility. Keeping the rent just at tier-recovery compensates the renters for the "skybox-only" restriction, and pretty much ensures no vacancy. You end up with your own ground-level parcel surrounded by pristine greenspace and a chat buffer.

One thing I'm embarrassed to say I haven't done, but will in the future, is to really solicit all neighbors' opinions on a ground build design before I impose it on them long-term. Just because there's no zoning commission doesn't mean I shouldn't get community input.

(I'm paranoid about private islands, till I can own the whole thing myself. Each time I've found an estate arrangement that was appealing, I've later learned that the estate owner vanished and everybody lost all the land they "bought" there. Maybe just bad luck. Would have been pretty while they lasted, though.)

tbh, i felt the same, from most places i`ve visited, the land owners don`t live on their own islands, it`s all just to make $$$

got an island and claimed half of it for myself and made 1/4th water for public usage so every one gets full land to build on, so far only my best friend moved in on a 10240sqm plot and the rest remains open and not going due to the reason u`ve posted :/

be wary of 'new' land or of many 512/1024s for sale in the same area. ill bet the 'perfect' hillside land you saw was new, then the adfarmers and so on bought a piece. sometimes they buy a piece and do nothing with it until the area develops a bit. then he splits them into ugly 16m adplots and sells them back to you for $1000 each. youre better off taking a less perfect plot on matured land. that way you at least know who the nieghbours are before you spend a wad of $.

or you can go the private estate route as mentioned above.

Good advice in the rest of the post .

For mainland sims, turn on "View / Properly Lines" (View / Land Owners might help make it more obvious) and fly around the sim and check for sliced out ad land that's being held until the rest they have for sale sells first.

If you see a plot for sale owned by any "investment" group or any "bank", that should be a big red flag that you're going to end up with ads all around.

there are some really nice lots on Shark... 1024 for $11,000L (or so) which would make your tier $5/mo.

next to a great sim. and i try to keep my lot attractive, as does eveyrone around them.

i've blocked the ad farm right next to me.

go see. i am thinking of buying some, but it would bring my tier to $15/mo. i am not sure i am ready for that committment.

If you rent from any of the names I listed on page one of this thread, you will be in good hands and not have any issues. A much higher percentage of Island owners are reputable than those who vanish.

Agreed. In fact, I make certain that new residents that approach me about buy into my estates are well aware that the 'risk' to estate that offsets the chaos of the mainland is indeed that an Estate Owner can take his ball and go home, leaving folks high and dry and that while I have covenanted provisions dealing with what happens if I ever sell off my sims, they have nothing more than my word holding me to it, because realistically what they'd lose, even collectively at this point, wouldn't amount to enough to try to pursue legal recourse.

I don't ever want a resident (residential or commercial) who isn't informed about the plusses and minuses, the securities and the risks, they are undertaking when they purchase land. And I'll sit down and discuss the issues with *anyone* who asks, even if they seem likely never to be a resident on my estates.

Char

My best advice is .. buy as close to the sim edge as is posible .. if your happy with your lot .. then stay and if need arises buy more land around you .. If you can afford the extra L$ to purchase at the very edge of the sim then go for it, bearing in mind as many posters have said teh LL may add extra sims off the "coast line" meaning your coastal beauty spot may then be "inland" though bordering water and though no longer unblockable but may still be considered prime estate and a beutiful place to set down roots.