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 16m
2. 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 16m
2 landmines, waiting to hold you hostage.
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.
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