Questions about Renting/ Buying/ Owning

[Red52]

Hello- I currently am renting a parcel on Mainland. Yesterday, I tried to change my Premium membership back to Basic but got an error message that said I 'must relinquish owned land before I can downgrade membership.'  Questions: 1) Can you NOT rent or buy any Mainland parcels unless you have a Premium membership?; 2) What are the differences between Buying, Renting, and Owning?; 3) If you Rent a parcel, are you considered as Owning it?

Thank you for your help!

Red52

[Chic Aeon]

Anyone can rent mainland.

 

The message (if correct) would be about mainland that you USED to own and perhaps didn't abandon when leaving OR tier that you DONATED to a group. 

 

Look in the backend webpage account and check both tier donations and "my land" and see what it might be. If the message is an error you will need to contact support.   

The land you are now RENTING isn't the problem. 

 

[Qie Niangao]

On Mainland, if you "buy" a parcel, it's considered "owning" it, and to do so you must be Premium (and if your Mainland holdings exceed 1024 sqm you'll pay tier to the Lab). You can "rent" Mainland from another resident without being Premium.

(For sanity, ignore this part: It's all confusingly different on Estates, where all those terms have a different meaning, and one can "buy" an Estate parcel in order to "rent" it from the resident who owns the Estate, or one can "rent" it from another resident who already rented it from the Estate by "buying" it -- which is all a thinly veiled scam to make the "buyer" think they're "owning" something they're only "renting" -- but that's beside the point in your case.)

Anyway, you can access pages off the dashboard to check what Mainland you may own and any tier you may have donated to groups.

[Prokofy Neva]

15 hours ago, Red52 said:

Hello- I currently am renting a parcel on Mainland. Yesterday, I tried to change my Premium membership back to Basic but got an error message that said I 'must relinquish owned land before I can downgrade membership.'  Questions: 1) Can you NOT rent or buy any Mainland parcels unless you have a Premium membership?; 2) What are the differences between Buying, Renting, and Owning?; 3) If you Rent a parcel, are you considered as Owning it?

Thank you for your help!

Red52

Technically, we're all renters here, even those of us who buy sims directly from LL and then pay tier and rent them out to others, or those who buy private islands and homesteads and "sell them" (really rent them, because they can seize them back any time) to others.

You don't need a premium account either to rent on the Mainland or rent or "buy" on an island -- it's all done without the premium. The premium is only if you want a Linden Home or to own land on the Mainland.

It's cheaper to rent on the Mainland from rental companies or another resident because you aren't paying the $11.99 premium per month and other costs (sometimes a house or skybox cost if they are provided), and they will have a bulk discount and typically a group 10% discount so they can give you a much cheaper price and/or more prims per parcel.

Private islands are usually more expensive to rent or "buy".

Rentals have all kinds of levels of rules or freedom, some with no rules, some with a few rules (like in mine, you can't have a security orb except in the sky above 500 m) and still others with heavy theme or RP or community rules. It's a renter's market, you have a vast array of options to choose from. Look for those that are refundable, usually for a small fee so you aren't locked in for a month until you settle on what you like.

[Red52]

Wow!  Thank you so much for all the terrific information, Prokofy Neva! 🙂  I've never seen a rental that is refundable; will have to look & ask about that, thanks.  Can Mainland properties be terraformed or the ground color changed?

[Sister Nova]

1 minute ago, Red52 said:

Wow!  Thank you so much for all the terrific information, Prokofy Neva! 🙂  I've never seen a rental that is refundable; will have to look & ask about that, thanks.  Can Mainland properties be terraformed or the ground color changed?

Mainland parcels can only be terraformed by the owner of the parcel, and depending where it is, there may be limits to the amount that can be done. The ground colour cannot be changed other than placing something over the ground that can then be textured.

[Sister Nova]

19 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

-- which is all a thinly veiled scam to make the "buyer" think they're "owning" something they're only "renting" --

In most cases the owner of the private region will have a covenant in place, and when the person pays to have the rights to the parcel they have to tick the box to say they've read the covenant. I don't believe this is a scam of any sort, thinly veiled or otherwise.

Having the parcel in their own name gives them certain rights as if they were the owner. Usually this includes a certain amount of terraforming (any restrictions would then be listed in the covenant), and also allows them to have access control to the parcel. They can even deed the parcel to their own group.

The big advantage to the owner of the region, is that the prim allocation is then monitored by the usual restrictions of land, rather than the whole region being owned by the region owner's group, which then involves monitoring prim usage for each tenant, having to contact the tenant when they go over limit, inviting the tenant and any of their friends that wish to have land rights to the land group, surveying all the parcels to ensure no one has 'lost' an item on someone else's parcel etc. I know that caspervend can do a lot, but it's SO much easier for the owner in having the parcels in the tenant's name, especially if they have a lot of regions. The region group method is usually employed by those wishing to make a community, where the people running the group have themselves rented a region from an owner and deeded the region to their group. They are usually very happy to provide the various services and monitoring for their sub tenants.

[Qie Niangao]

31 minutes ago, Walpurgisnacht said:

I don't believe this is a scam of any sort, thinly veiled or otherwise.

It's the deceptive language abuse that's a scam, set up when Estates were brand new. I blame Anshe, frankly, but there were a lot of cooks of that toxic broth -- she just made the most bank from it. The fact that we have to use "as if they were the owner" to describe the result of "buying" a rental parcel pretty much says it all. And the result is that newbies to SL are baffled by the whole concept of land "ownership"-- I've explained it countless times, and I'm by no means the most patient with all these bewildered queries.

Incidentally, all the advantages you cite are readily available to Mainland rentals -- as long as they're accompanied by a dedicated per-rental land group. If the Lab had made that scalable instead of all the development it took to give Estate owners the ability to reclaim "sold" parcels, Mainland rentals would have benefited along with Estates -- which, of course, would have worked against the interests of those very early Estate owners.