Land Buying Primer: Hostage Land Squares

Buying land for the first time is a little scary. It's expensive, it's an opaque process, and once you buy it, you're stuck with it, until you can resell. There are plenty of unscrupulous sellers out there more than willing to prey on the ignorance of a first-time buyer, and even legitimate land resellers are in it to make a profit, not to help you find a good deal. That said, there are good reasons to buy land, especially now. Land is relatively cheap, down half or a third from the terrible highs of earlier this year. LL has apparently committed to keeping the land supply up on the front end. Having land also gives you a real home, space, and prims to build a house, a private place to play, or a place to build. If you're a builder it's especially nice to have your own place to make stuff, rather than relying on public sandboxes. To help you make good decisions and not get screwed, I'm going to write a few articles, not only describing various ways land sellers try to fuck you over, but also answering a lot of common questions about land buying that don't seem to get addressed elsewhere. The focus of this article is a way to get screwed by buying land near hostage land squares. Hostage land squares work like this. The owner of a plot splits it into two or more parcels. One parcel is large and looks normal. The other parcel(s) are tiny, usually the minimum 16m². Sometimes these squares will be along the side or seperated somewhat, but often they are embedded right in the middle of the plot. The hapless land buyer buys the main plot, not noticing or appreciating the significance of the little missing squares. After you've committed the buy, something strange happens. For sale signs go up right next to or even inside your property. Now this ugly rotating thing is making a nuisance of itself right in the middle of your new land. The catch is, to get rid of it, you have to buy it. And, surprise, it's extremely expensive: That's the essence of this scam: you have to pay far more than that little square is worth in order to get rid of the annoyance of having the giant rotating sign there. In this case the seller is especially annoying, more or less owning up to what they're doing in their profile: [coming soon] Sometimes whole crops of these things spring up: This basically destroys the value of any real land in that sim (which is a reason that LL might think about regulating this practice, perhaps by increasing the minimum saleable area, or making it expensive to hold a large number of small parcels, with some kind of extra tier fee). Sometimes these spots are billed as "advertising space", like buying a billboard, but this type of advertisement isn't cost-effective in SL. The best way to protect yourself is to not get involved with land like this. Use alt-control-shift-P to make sure that the parcel you're buying isn't embedded with 16m² landmines, waiting to hold you hostage.

Prim Efficiency & Openspace

I noticed this little link in my gmail earlier:

which reminded me that openspace sims are unfortunately not economically viable, thanks to a strange decision by Linden Labs.

In case you don't know, so-called openspace regions* are the same size as an ordinary region: 256 x 256m, which is 65,536 square meters. Unlike a normal region, which has a cap of 15,000 prims, an openspace region has only gives you 1,875 prims. In principle this makes it suitable for low-density forest or ocean, with few or no structures. There are some caveats to this -- you buy openspace sims in groups of four, and you have to already own a conventional island to do this. These four sims share a single CPU, where a normal sim has a dedicated CPU, which is the fundamental reason for the decrease -- this will impact physics calculations and so on, and make large groups of avatars even more problematic than usual.

But the economic problem that results is more insidious. Each openspace has 1,875 prims, so a set of four of them total 7,500 prims, half that of a normal region -- but these four regions collectively cost the same as a regular sim, US$1,625 up front and US$295 per month. In a regular island you're getting about 50.8 prims per US$ per month (ppdm), but only 25.4 ppdm for openspace. This ppdm value is one of the least efficient -- you're getting almost the fewest prims per dollar that you can.

This is too bad, because it makes these sims totally unviable economically. If you have been in SL for a while, and especially if you build, you know that area very seldom limits your creativity but that prims constantly do. Even in a conventional sim, you get about one prim for every 4 and a third square meters of land, which is an extremely low density. You almost always run out of prims before you run out of land (and sky), and so in general prims are what should be driving your buying decisions. Landlords who want to rent this land out have to charge rates that should make you cringe.

For example, let's look at the link in the ad above. If we do a little digging we find a price structure here. The price per month for half a sim is, as advertised, US$55, for which you get 937 prims spread over 32,768 sqm. In addition you have to sink US$245 in up front. The same number of prims in the mainland put you in the US$25 tier, less than half. And it would be unusual to spend more than about L$8/meter up front, which works out to be US$120 -- again less than half. Not a good deal!

It's vexing that LL makes space like this available because it's one more way that inexperienced land buyers can get screwed. I'll be posting various other ways to get screwed buying land later today or tomorrow.

* Note that this Linden blog entry is pretty old, and predates the most recent increase in price.