Land Advice / Help

[UberSkills]

Hi guys

 

I really want to "own" my own bit of land. Im looking at a 1024 bit of land to buy. Im new to SL and i understand that you have to pay a fee each month if you buy land outright. I dont mind about paying the monthly fee charges but what i would like to know is ...

 

If i get a month membership just to get the premium access to buy the land i want will i then own the land permanantly or after the month premium membership is up will i lose the land ?

 

Any help would be very appreciated.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

If you buy mainland, you will own it as long as you pay the monthly fee and keep your premium membership up to date.  Premium membership also has a re-occurring fee that you pay monthly, quarterly, annually etc.  If you go premium the annual membership is the best deal if you are going to own land.  It works out, after you figure the benefits of your first 512 of land tier free and the 300L a week stipend, to be almost free.

One word of caution: if you fail to pay your tier or premium fee you have a grace period but eventually if you haven't paid by the end of the grace period your account will be suspended and you won't be able to log in to SL until you pay all money owed.  If your account is suspended there is no guarantee your inventory can be restored when your account is and you can also lose your land.  To avoid this be sure to abandon the land and downgrade to basic membership well before the due dates if you can't pay.

 

[UberSkills]

Thanks alot for explaining that i had no clue about payments and land taken.

 

Great help and land bought with quartely membership and ongoing payments for the future.

 

Appreciated.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Could swear I read this exact same question a week ago...

Ok, so you have three purchases to make for this:

1. Premium

2. A plot of land

3. Tier for any land ore than 512m (or 560m if land belongs to a group).

 

You can pay the premium fee monthly, quarterly, or annually. Discounted for the second two option.

*****

 

You buy the plot of land just once. And then own it until you sell it or fail to pay premium or tier bill (they give you several days if you end up late - at least the first time. Happened to me once when my bank and paypalgot confused over who the other was, and both my paypal and my bank account got locked to all but in person cash, from a mistake THEY made...)

- Shop smart here. I very often see people buy land on hills or over water, and then rez flat houses with not under-support. They bought a plot of land that was likely being sold for 10x the price they needed. Flat land is the cheap stuff - and a smart shopper can find it on a nice looking sim. If you buy on a hill, beach, or water - learn how to build things like foundation walls or poles under your house, or to make cliffside scenes... otherwise you're wasting your money on that land (and making all your neighbors super mad at you for ruining the area).

Also consider that if you buy on water - people around you will expect to be able to sail through it, and if you block that, you'll end up surrounded by neighbors that hate you and do things to make your life unpleasant.

 

*****

You pay tier monthly. There's no way to pay less often that I know of. Nor to pay more often or in advance. Nor can you pick the date of the bill. Its set to the day you first ever go above 512m of land. You only pay tier for land you have above the first 512m.

 

Note that if you "deed" your land allowance to a group, the group gets 10% more land than you deeded. So the 512 becomes 560m (not 563.2 - they round it down). If you buy 512 more tier, for 1024 total, deeding that to a group gives you 1126m of land allowance.

The first few bumps up in tier are super cheap. $5 and $8 I think (yeah one of them is only $3 more than the other). But after that it starts to go up fast.

 

 

Lastly: the amount of land you need is dictated by the size of your avatar - but only if you're a decent builder and know how to resize your house / furniture. This is doubly true if you have a mesh house and furniture - as mesh's land impact is based on how big it is scaled to.

[UberSkills]

Hi there

 

I went and bought a 2048 land and got full membership i understand what you guys have said so far. 1 thing im not quite sure of is if i abandon my linden home i gain 117 prims to use extra on on 2048 land right ? And also pay a little less towards this land instead of $15 it goes down to $8 ?

 

Many thanks this is helping me out a great deal so far. Im still learning about SL so its appreciated.

[Qie Niangao]

No, that's a little confused.

If you abandon your Linden Home, you free-up the 512 sq.m. of tier that had been covering its ownership. You could use that tier to instead cover ownership of more land in the same region as you own the 2048 sq.m. already -- if you can find the right size land for sale in that region. Prims can only be shared among parcels within a region. 

And I'm afraid you can't reduce from $15 to $8 unless you get rid of a lot more land than just the Linden Home. The $8 / mo tier level only supports 1024 sq.m. above-and-beyond the "bonus" 512 that comes with Premium membership. So, to get down to US$8, you'd need to abandon your Linden Home and sell or abandon some of that 2048 to get it down to 1536 sq.m.

(You can do just slightly better than that using an advanced technique of group-deeded land. You could actually own 1680 sq.m. of group-deeded land, instead of only 1536 sq.m. of individually-owned land. Usually you won't want to bother with that, however, because land tends to be sold in 512 sq.m. increments... but if you're selling or abandoning bits of a parcel, you can carve it down in 16 sq.m. increments.)

[UberSkills]

Ok im understanding alot more.

 

Im also just curious of 1 more thing. If i buy land and abandon it within 24 hours does that charge for the land of $15 already get taken from my bank or will it be at the end of the month period ? I ask this because i made a very silly mistake of getting some 2048 land and had it about 24 hours or less but then i found a 4096 that was really nice so i abandon the 2048 land at a lss of lindens but now im worried i will staill have to pay the monthly charge of $15 even though i did not use it a full month ?

 

Thank you for any information you could provide to this.

[Qie Niangao]

Well, you'll be billed for the maximum amount of land owned at any point during the past 30 days. Assuming the 4096 you mention is also Mainland, and because you abandoned the 2048 before you bought the 4096, you'll just be billed for the 4096 which is US$ 25.

If you'd held both the 2048 and the 4096 simultaneously at any point, you'd be billed for the next tier level above 4096 which is actually US$ 40.

(Edit to add: I suppose you could in theory get very, very unlucky and have the end of your billing period occur in the brief interval between owning the 2048 and the 4096. In that case, one month you'd be billed for the 2048 and the next month start getting 4096 bills. I'm actually not sure how the specific dates for billing periods are set for each account. Maybe starting from the first date any charges are incurred? Dunno.)

[UberSkills]

Qie Niangao thank you so much for the help you have just saved me alot of money :matte-motes-wink:

[UberSkills]

Hi so sorry to trouble you guys again

 

I have found 512 land not far from mine but i am not 100% sure if this as clased in the region as its a different name to what mine is. Could someone please clarify if this would be in same region or not ? Please see image on following link : http://postimg.org/image/7o4vhkh83/

 

Also if this was in the same region i just abandon my linden home and buy this and then the prims would increase on my big land because i buy the 512 land ?

 

Many thanks and sorry for the trouble again.

[Qie Niangao]

No, that 512 is in the "Varsity" region but your land is in "Wollah" according to that map. So as you guessed, those different names mean different regions.

(Those sometimes are informally called different "sims" although technically a "sim" is the software process that realizes the "region". You can safely ignore all that.)

Even though it doesn't work in this case, you have the right idea: all land owned by the same owner in the same region shares the same pool of prims. For convenience, parcels like that can be combined (even if they're not contiguous -- they just have to be in the same region), but whether combined or separate, as long as they have the same owner in the same region, their prims are pooled.

[Pussycat Catnap]

It may help a lot to go to NCI Kuala and look at their schedule of classes. They used to teach one on the basics of land owning / renting. If they still have it, you might enjoy sitting in on it and asking as many questions as you can during the Q&A period.