Josie Fotherington wrote: Skybeam Estates does that too. I love the concept, but you are right in that it's land-management intensive. You need a dedicated land management team with online records that everyone can see and edit. CDS' land management is still too....well....hosed.
I'm not sure what "hosed" means... and it's not really a matter of online records which everyone can see and edit (which would be easy enough to do). The problem goes back to the fundamental disconnect between the "yellow map" system of parcel ownership and the mechanisms of tier payment and record-keeping.
When LL developed the idea of privately owned parcels in SL, they launched the essence, the underpining, of the SL economy. The entire universe of revenue in SL is rooted in land and the prims it supports. It was a genius concept from Philip Rosedale and his group and has enabled the vastly multi-layered economy of SL in a way that LL has never understood. But there was always a small problem, and that was that, unless you were paying for your land directly to LL, for which ample mechanism had been put in place (of course), it was difficult for land owners to "re-sell" or "rent" their parcels of land. The process of re-selling was easy enough, but collecting monthly tier for more than a few tenant-holders was administratively difficult... it all had to be done manually.
Soon entrepreneurs, most notably Hippo Technologies, developed their hugely popular rental system (which we use now in the CDS). But when they developed this system, they developed it for owners who wished to "rent" parcels to other residents, rather than for private sim owners who wished to engage in "yellow map" sales of their parcels. Why?... probably for several reasons. A "Rental" system could be used anywhere on the grid, both on the mainland and on private sims, while on the mainland an "owner" cannot also sell a parcel and still own it, as is possible on a private sim. Also, and this is technically important, it was not until recently possible to uniquely identify a parcel... the computer code of SL (called LSL) did not include recognition of the unique identifiers of parcels (and everything else in SL) called the UUID. So writing an application that would enable private sim owners to fully manage their "sold" parcels was impossible until a few years ago. However, there is still no such commercially available system.
To get back to the point here. In order to "bind together" the parcel-purchase action with the tier-payment action, third party software would be needed that doesn't exist. Implementing the idea of "giving land away for free" has as a critical component that people pay at least one month tier when they take possession, which is why in New England I price the land at one month tier. But after they buy, I must then manually set up a tier box for them to pay further months tier to (I don't use Hippo in New England). Alternately, in the CDS, when someone purchased a parcel which had been set for sale for one month of tier, an official would need to then manually set the tier box of that parcel for one month of free tier (or 2 months... or whatever amount of time the initial purchase price provided to the buyer). This is entirely possible... but labor intensive, since SO MANY parcels of land change hands in the CDS each month. THAT is really the obstacle to this otherwise very good idea that Pat presents.
I hope this clarifies something about our land management system. It's not ideal... Timo Gufler and I have had many discussions about projects to improve it. But, apart from abandoning the "yellow map" system of land ownership entirely and converting to a parcel rental system, I think our system is as good as we can manage with available tools.
Sudane..................