"$ 60 Lindens a week Skybox. "

[JebediahSpringfield]

Hey. Today I saw "$ 60 Lindens a week

Skybox. "Skybox these contain at least 140 prims. But their rent out for 60 Lindens per week.
They are on the mainland. How do they do it? it turns out $ 105 per month - for sim on the mainland!?
But this is an incredible price. Who knows how they do it? s an example:

 

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Necrotee/217/157/302/?img=http://secondlife.com/app/image/825f8503-99e7-62d5-fc5d-2d2b313ca964/3&title=%21%2460+Linden+Rental+001

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

A mainland sim is $195US per month. They may not own the whole sim though, but that is irrelevant.

They can do it because they probably are renting only the skybox not the land under it.

• They don't care about profit, they just want some help on their tiers
• They have a number of skyboxes stacked up in the sky above one land parcel that 'share' one large land parcel under them and together the rents cover the tier. (You can get a lot of skyboxes up there if you stack them 200 meters apart from 300 meters to 4096 meters.)
• It is group owned land where a number of premium members of the group contributed their free 510sqm plus there is a 10% of all land owned by the group Bonus that is tier free, reducing their tier to as low as zero depending on how much land was contributed
• The owner of the land has a lifetime premium membership (no longer available) that they paid a large lump sum for and they received free land proportionate to what they paid

 Or any combination of the above.  Some mainland is double prim land too, although just a small percentage.

[Qie Niangao]

This is on an exceptionally nondescript corner of Nautilus (the continent, not the city), so the land itself is pretty much worthless -- no costs there to amortize over the rentals. (It's certainly not double-prim!)

For cheap, stacked skyboxes, it's unfortunately common for certain landlords to "overbook" prims. The big guys never do it, but those with no particular reputation will try it -- and often get away with it for quite a while, especially if they have enough turnover that at any instant they're well short of capacity.

No idea if that's what's going on in this particular case, but when something looks too good to be true....

[JebediahSpringfield]

you want to say, they give prims more than themselves have? Hope that not all the skybox will be opened and rented?

[Qie Niangao]

Probably. Maybe, that is, sort of a prim timeshare, but with no schedule to prevent too many people showing up at the same time.

I peeked in at that location. The lease doesn't seem to include any tenant-owned prim allowance at all, but rather a choice of pre-furnished skybox scenes that rez on demand. It's possible they have enough prims available to cover all potential renter choices simultaneously, but it seems doubtful because the rental scene locations look to be very numerous.

If they are overbooking prims, they might leverage their prims pretty far because they can de-rez the whole house structure and all furnishings when tenants aren't present.

[Tari Landar]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

 

If they are overbooking prims, they might leverage their prims pretty far because they can de-rez the whole house structure and all furnishings when tenants aren't present.

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That is precisely how they, and other even larger rental places as well, work. Places not in use, get de-rezzed, with only minimal prims still present when the tenant is not.(like ground, for instance, or the dome over a skybox, etc..)

They don't overbook their prims, there are never enough rental units occupied to do so. It's possible that it could potentially happen, but it's a miniscule possibility, and not remotely ever going to be likely.

How they cover their full cost of the sim, is anyone's guess. Maybe they aren't actually trying to cover the whole cost, just some of it. Maybe they use a certain portion of their sim(s) and just want the part they don't need to use, serve some kind of purpose and help them lower the cost.  People price at all kinds of ranhges, for all kinds of reasons. It doesn't always mean something nefarious is up.

[Qie Niangao]

It depends, I suppose, on the definition of "overbook" -- to me, that's exactly overbooking, same as airlines do; they only have to deal with it when too many passengers try to claim the seats they booked.

While I knew the practice was not uncommon, whether we consider it nefarious or not would presumably depend on just how far they leverage their prims -- that is, how likely it is that they're promising something they can't deliver. If their prices are substantially lower than others in the same game, they're playing with more risk (or simply losing money on the deal).

Oh, also: Yeah, in theory the owners could be trying to subsidize a part of their overall sim cost, but in this particular instance, the sim is just a basket of junk parcels with no apparent pattern of ownership, so I think it's just this one misshapen parcel with scores of skyboxes rezzed in a kind of vertical sprawl.