Totally confused about land holdings

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

I decided to go premium so that I could get a little parcel for my new store. the 512 is ok size-wise for now, but I need more LI allowance. I've read about different ways to do this:

1.  the obvious: buy a larger parcel
2. another obvious, but not possible in my current situation: buy an adjoining parcel to combine
3. buy more land in the same region and deed the land to the group (along with the original land, I assume)
4. create an alt, go premium with the alt, buy another 512 in the region and deed it to the group. 
5. others?

Questions: 

1. what is the best and cheapest way to accomplish my goals (I assume many of you out there that have been at this longer than me have already figured this out)?
2. what are the pros/cons of group land vs. private ownership?
3. how do I know where the region ends, for my land search, should I go one of those options?

Thank you for your responses and for all the time and effort you already put in to answering this question for yourself. Alas, time is something I lack. 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Honestly, I wouldn't have gone premium in your case and would have rather rented a small plot of land from a private estate on a commercially orientated sim run by an established big land baron. But now that you are premium ...

Apparently, you already own a 512sqm plot - I looked up your profile inworld and followed the link in your picks
Your sim = region is named Olexandrovich and you would need to buy a second plot of land within the same sim to combine its prims with your current allowance. 
However, there aren't any plots for sale in your sim right now, but there is a quite huge chuck of abandomed land beginning just behind your store. In some cases, people appaerently were very lucky and could request that the land or chunks of it were put on auction, so they could buy it. 
Additionally, there is a rental plot just across the Linden road, 1500ish sqm, which the owner seems to rent out ... you could try and contact them to ask if they'd be willing to sell the plot.

Group-owned land has one huge advantage... you get a 10% bonus for more land for literally nothing, so instead of being a single avatar who can own 512 sqm for free, a group can hold 560ish-I-suck-at-maths, along with the small increase of prims. The group must be the owner of all plots to combine them. 
You can deed your free 512 sqm tier to your group's holdings. To add more tier allowance, you can either tier up on your end and add the extra to your group, or get a premium alt with their free tier or rent tier from a business for certain rates. You have to do some calculating what will be the cheapest for your needs.

As for navigating ...
Inworld, go to the World menu, on to "Show more", then check "Property Lines" and, if you wish, "Land Owners". You'll immediately see the land borders all over the sim. If you also checked the land owners options, the plots will also have a colored overlay to show what land belongs to you, what is available to buy and so on.
That, the "about land" dialogue and the world map are your tools for visually navigating a sim. 

Concerning your group management:
It is strongly recommended that you add an alt to your group, preferably to the owner role like yourself, so you and your alt are always members of your group to keep it alive and to have a management "back-up" account.
Also, from a shopper's point of view, afraid I wouldn't waste a precious group slot just for store info. Look into systems like Subscribe-O-Matic and whatever is out there, that'll allow you to send news and info without the need for a group slot.

 

You can read a lot of helpful advice concerning each of your issues if you browse the forums for a little while. That'll give you a lot more detail than my rather general reply.

[Chic Aeon]

2 hours ago, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Group-owned land has one huge advantage... you get a 10% bonus for more land for literally nothing, so instead of being a single avatar who can own 512 sqm for free, a group can hold 560ish-I-suck-at-maths, along with the small increase of prims. The group must be the owner of all plots to combine them. 
You can deed your free 512 sqm tier to your group's holdings. To add more tier allowance, you can either tier up on your end and add the extra to your group, or get a premium alt with their free tier or rent tier from a business for certain rates. You have to do some calculating what will be the cheapest for your needs.

Unless things have changed you do not have to have the land in a group (should you have two lots in the same sim that you own) in order to have the land impact combined. The land group I am in (just some friends with a tiny bit of land -- I rent my shop space) has had three lots for years. They are in a group so that WE can share the land, not get the bonus. Honestly that bonus has never been used because unless you have many avatars in the group there is simply nothing to buy with it. Most lots are 512 - 1024 - 2048 with a few in between. The few between are almost never what the extra group 10 would be if used. So personally I would take that part of the equation out of the mix.

 

One thing you can do is to get a very low prim skybox (2 land impact) to use as your shop leaving you 173 land impact for your products. 

You can link items together (NOT vendors) in some cases turning cubes into "convex hull" and linking. So two cubes linked (any size or shape) and changed to convex hull becomes one. This is VERY handy. DO NOT LINK SCULPTS (or at least test on copies and do it on the sandbox). Generally stay away from sculpts as much as you can (many reasons). 

Use mesh display cases (go see them in world to make sure the LODs are good) for complex arrangements. 

Since your shop is H and G (like mine) you can sell COPIES of the items rather than through a vendor system saving one or more prims per item. This has a downsize of no redelivery, group bonuses and such but I have been doing things this way for seven years and can only think of two times when that would have been helpful.  So you choice there.

If you stick with H and G then you WILL need more space. That is a given and part of the deal :D.  I agree that renting is just fine. I am on mainland and have almost a quarter of a sim for $50 a month. It will be a long time until you need that much :D.  

The other alternative is to mostly sell from the Marketplace and have some popular items in your tiny 512 shop. That works too for some folks.

 

Good luck.

My personal advice is to start small and grow slowly :D. 

[EllieAnne Silverfall]

thank you for all your replies. I think I'm going to keep my main shop for a moment and look for a busy commercial rental until I get myself established. Why not have two spaces? Now the hunt for a decent rental... 

[Kotelle]

as far as I know, there are also some parcels with double prims allowance (City Bay?) so you can have 512 but with prims as if it was 1024. But these are rather expensive. 

[iamyourneighbour]

On 9/7/2017 at 12:32 AM, EllieAnne Silverfall said:

I decided to go premium so that I could get a little parcel for my new store. the 512 is ok size-wise for now, but I need more LI allowance. I've read about different ways to do this:

1.  the obvious: buy a larger parcel
2. another obvious, but not possible in my current situation: buy an adjoining parcel to combine
3. buy more land in the same region and deed the land to the group (along with the original land, I assume)
4. create an alt, go premium with the alt, buy another 512 in the region and deed it to the group. 
5. others?

Questions: 

1. what is the best and cheapest way to accomplish my goals (I assume many of you out there that have been at this longer than me have already figured this out)?
2. what are the pros/cons of group land vs. private ownership?
3. how do I know where the region ends, for my land search, should I go one of those options?

Thank you for your responses and for all the time and effort you already put in to answering this question for yourself. Alas, time is something I lack. 

1. The cheapest way to get more parcels is to make alts, sub them all to premium and donate their 512m2 allowance to your land holding group.

Group holds 10% more than individuals, and you can feed the sitpend back to your main account at the end of each year, most of the times you lose only $5 in value. In other words, you spend just $5 to hold 512 m2 for the course of a year.

Do keep in mind your $75 will be in a perpetual cycle of unavailability, so only do this if you have cash ready. On the up side, you can pull out anytime and the net balance is near zero sum.
 

2. Group ownership wins outright
Individual ownership - No benefits whatsoever - apart from being simple

Group holding, gives you 10% more holding power, but if you do not manage it carefully you will most likely have an event where you juggle lands incorrectly and make everything disappear. Group holding land beats individual ownership by far, but you need to continue to develop group management knowledge even if it's just you and your alts in the group. 

3. The region
The region boundry has a really thick boarder, right click on the land and select "edit terrain" and it will give itself away.

Edited September 27, 2017 by iamyourneighbour

[Hintswen Guardian]

On 13/09/2017 at 6:37 AM, Kotelle said:

as far as I know, there are also some parcels with double prims allowance (City Bay?) so you can have 512 but with prims as if it was 1024. But these are rather expensive. 

Bay city, nautilus, horizons and part of zindra are like this. There's one more place I can't remember the name of that I haven't counted. 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 9/27/2017 at 8:38 AM, iamyourneighbour said:

1. The cheapest way to get more parcels is to make alts, sub them all to premium and donate their 512m2 allowance to your land holding group.

Group holds 10% more than individuals, and you can feed the sitpend back to your main account at the end of each year, most of the times you lose only $5 in value. In other words, you spend just $5 to hold 512 m2 for the course of a year.

Do keep in mind your $75 will be in a perpetual cycle of unavailability, so only do this if you have cash ready. On the up side, you can pull out anytime and the net balance is near zero sum.
 

2. Group ownership wins outright
Individual ownership - No benefits whatsoever - apart from being simple

Group holding, gives you 10% more holding power, but if you do not manage it carefully you will most likely have an event where you juggle lands incorrectly and make everything disappear. Group holding land beats individual ownership by far, but you need to continue to develop group management knowledge even if it's just you and your alts in the group. 

3. The region
The region boundry has a really thick boarder, right click on the land and select "edit terrain" and it will give itself away.

I'm not getting your math here.

Annualized premiums are $72/year. 

If you buy 10 alts and take their 512 and put it into a group, you generate essentially an 11th free 512 as the group bonus, the 10%.

But you still have to pay $720 a year for those accounts, not $5 a year,  and not even $5 a month, but $6 a month. That's why your scheme of multiple alts doesn't make sense to me. Because instead of those expensive mouths to feed at $72/year costing $6 for that extra 512, you could take one of the accounts and add 512 to him for only another $5 per month in tier, not $6.

Or you could buy a sim for $195 tier, and the next sim after that will have a reduction in cost for the half tier (see the land tier table). That would be the more efficient way I think.

Maybe for a small operation of 8192 m or twice that this scheme would make sense. But you do realize, right that after the first 65,336 of land (a full sim, or $195 tier), the tier at the next half level is discounted.

So let's say you own 3 sims. The next level up at the half-sim level isn't $125 for half a sim as it is in the earlier part of the tier ladder, but only $97.50. So your 3.5 sim tier is $682.50.

In other words, beyond the $195 full-sim level (which doesn't have to be a contiguous sim, it could be 50 parcels on 50 sims that equal 65336), your idea makes no sense in financial terms.

In my rentals, the 10% bonus essentially generates me another sim, free of tier. But as you say, this has to be managed very carefully and can mess up due to different billing dates, partners flaking and pulling your tier (if you have them), losing flexibility to get out of areas that don't rent because you can't tier down in fine enough increments, etc.

Edited January 20, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Madelaine McMasters]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm not getting your math here.

Annualized premiums are $72/year. 

Based on a L$250/US$1 exchange rate, figures in US$.

Premium:  $72
Signing bonus: $4
Stipend: $1.20/wk, $62.40/yr

Annualized premium = $72 - $4 - $62.40 = $5.60

If you game the system by retiring and creating alts to take perpetual advantage of the signing bonus, and take those alts premium during promotional periods, you can maintain that rate or better indefinitely.

Edited January 20, 2018 by Madelaine McMasters

[LittleMe Jewell]

The stipulation being that you must save up those weekly stipends and convert them back to US$

 

 

and not let the primary account steal them for shopping

 

Edited January 20, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[Madelaine McMasters]

16 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

The stipulation being that you must save up those weekly stipends and convert them back to US$

 

 

and not let the primary account steal them for shopping

 

Yes, people trying to game the system this way will strike some kind of balance between taking money back out and spending it in-world. Given the transaction costs, you wouldn't want to take money out in small amounts, so you do have to figure in the cost of the money you've tied up until you cash it back in bulk at some later date. The entire enterprise would be too fiddly for me, who spends probably L$500/year, but it needn't cost $72/yr per account.

[Prokofy Neva]

20 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Based on a L$250/US$1 exchange rate, figures in US$.

Premium:  $72
Signing bonus: $4
Stipend: $1.20/wk, $62.40/yr

Annualized premium = $72 - $4 - $62.40 = $5.60

If you game the system by retiring and creating alts to take perpetual advantage of the signing bonus, and take those alts premium during promotional periods, you can maintain that rate or better indefinitely.

Well, sure, you can do that -- the value of the sign-on bonus drops out in the second month though, and I don't think the Lindens will let you keep endlessly buying Premiums to get the sign-up stipend. I don't know what their current policy is on that, but years ago, a screen would stop you from doing this, or the effort to make the new Premium would fail.

The $300 stipend annualized and debited plus the sign on fee still gives you $5.60, not $5, and that's not trivial, and as I keep saying, one account changed to 1024 tier will cost $5 so it's silly to risk the vagaries of the LindEx to do this.

There's another issue, which is that the stipend on alts can be set to debit ad fees to have that not come out of your main's revenue each week. That's what I do. So those stipends get used up on that.

I guess I'm reluctant to plan anything in SL as "annualized"...anything, and never have. It is too risky.

[Prokofy Neva]

18 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

The stipulation being that you must save up those weekly stipends and convert them back to US$

 

 

and not let the primary account steal them for shopping

 

Each alt is a mouth to feed, however, that has to be clothed in at least something past 2007 and look good, especially if they have to be used for any customer service. Sure, you can make a mule alt and keep them in a system outfit buried in the group. 

Now that groups require 2, not 3 to hold together, I simply retired some of my alts, they are expensive and even their $500 stipends from an earlier era don't make so much shopping/expense/tier difference as to be worth the recurring charge which is always an annoyance. Annualizing is a kind of dream that overlooks real costs in my view.

[iamyourneighbour]

I never give my alts anything apart from system presets lol. MP requires no bot to service ?