What Is Second Life Land Rental?

Second Life Land Rental is an excellent way in which you can open up wonderful opportunities for creation and a fuller engagement in Second Life.

Although there are two categories of Land, Mainland and Estate Land for the purpose of this guide we will only be looking at Second Life Land Rental on Estate Land.

An Estate Sim is one that is owned by someone other than Linden Lab. Linden still host the sims on their servers and also charge the sim owner a monthly fee to provide, hosting, maintainance and customer service for the sim. 

It is possible for an individual or a group to own as many or as few sims as they like. As soon as someone owns a full island they become an Estate Owner. Some Estates are only one sim but others have many sims. There are some Estate Owners that have sims in the thousands.

The cost to buy a whole sim from Linden Lab and pay the monthly fee on it is not cheap. This makes ownership of a full sim prohibitive. However some Estate Owners rent or sell parts or parcel of their sims to residents at substantially lower costs than it would be if they were paying for a full sim. The cost of course depends on the size of the parcel or on the amount of prims being allocated to the resident.

Estates Owners who rent or sell parcels on sims are known as a "Land Barons". There business is to subdivide full sims into smaller parcels and rent or sell them to Second Life residents. Tribe Islands is an Estate that provides such a service.

Second life Land Rental on Estate Land is fairly straight forward. But, a word of warning, buyer beware. From time to time you will hear horror stories about rogue "Land Baron" Estateswho have been less than honest in their business practices. Now, it should be said that this is Extremely rare and in all but a very few cases could have been avoided if a little more care had been taken.

Here we hope that we can guide you through the process of Second Life land Rental on Estate Land and point out the what to look for and how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

Types Of Sim

There are three types of sim. A full region, a homestead region and a open space region. They are all the same size at 65536 square meters. However they do all have different prim counts. They also have different use allowances as dictated by Linden Lab.

Full Region has 15000 prims

Homestead region has 3750 prims

Open Space region has 750 prims

Both Full Sims and Homestead sims can be divided into smaller parcels in order to rent or sell to residents. The Open Space sim cannot be used for commercial use or for residential use. It is purely for decorative use ie: sea or forest.

Sim Themes

Such is the diversity of Second Life that there are literally hundreds of different themed sims. Tropical Beach, Lakeland, Forest, Snow Covered,  Sci-Fi, Mountain and Urban Commercial are amongst the most popular. There are however many specialist themes that exist. Land for rent is available in most categories, the Second life Search will be a great help on finding the more specialised ones.

Tribe Islands specialises in Tropical Beach and Island Sims, Tropical Island Sims, Lakeland Waterfront Sims and Lush Rainforest Sims.

The Covenant

Reputation

Estate owners who are involved in Second Life Land Rental will only be successful if they have a good reputation. Word of mouth is a very powerful force in dictating who is a success or not. It is particularly relevant now with the increased use of social networks. So if you are looking at renting a particular parcel do a few checks into the Landlords reputation. Ask some existing tenants to tell you about the landlord. Is the service good? is it prompt? are they available to answer questions? You can even seek references in forums and twitter etc. Doing these checks will give you a good indication of how you will be treated if you are to become a resident. It cannot be emphasized enough how important this stage is. 

Parcel Size

Finding Your Ideal Parcel

Landlord/Tenant

Land Uses

Second Life Land Rental

Do I have to be a Premium Member

No. When you rent from a Private Estate you do not have to be paying for a Second Life Premium Membership

Second Life Land Rental