Page 2 of 2

Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:08 pm
by Han Held

I think I'm missing several tricks here, feel free to critique.
I think that we need to make a distinction between core CDS (in order: NFS, CN and MA) and non-core (everything else).
To try to address this, I'm going to paste my version of the legistlation, based on Rosie's post from earlier. My changes in bold:

In the Confederation of Democratic Sims, it is the responsibility of the CDS government to ensure that the estate is financially managed in a responsible manner with an overall goal of keeping CDS in the black.

Tenancy fluctuations and long term vacancies can negatively impact the financial health of the estate. This bill establishes parameters for selling a CDS region if it remains vacant, in the red and a financial liability.


For historic and economic reasons the following regions will not be effected by this bill: Neufreistadt, Colonia Nova and Monastery. Furthermore, Neufreistadt will be acknowledged to be the core region of the CDS and will be protected from closure as long as tier is able to be paid or until Secondlife closes.

1) If a region in the CDS fails to generate more than 75% of its monthly tier expense for more than three consecutive months, the Chancellor is empowered to take steps to sell the region, if he /she deems it in the best financial interests of the CDS.

2) The Chancellor will determine the sale price of the region based on the average market sale price for regions of that type at that time.

3) The Chancellor will give the RA 14 days written notice of his or her intention to start the sale process; he or she will post to the Forums and the inworld group that this notice has been given. Land will also remain for sale during this 14 day period; if occupancy increases to over 75% during the 14 days the sale process will halt.*

4) The RA may meet during that time and confirm or overrule the Chancellor's decision, which may be accomplished by a simple majority vote. If the RA does not give a decision within 14 days, or if they confirm the Chancellor's decision to sell, the Chancellor will then stop the sale of all land in the region and will give all landowners in the region 30 days notice of the impending sale.

5) If occupancy of the region drops below 75% again within the next 3 months, the Chancellor may invoke this law again, without the need for a three month consecutive occupancy below 75%.

6) Three days prior to the sale date, the Chancellor will review the financial status of the sim and post his/her findings to the CDS Group inworld and on the CDS forum.

a. If the sim generated at least 75% of its monthly tier expense, the sale of the sim will halt.
b. If the sim did not generate at least 75% of its monthly tier expense, the Chancellor will announce his/her intentions to sell the sim or not in the CDS Group inworld and on the CDS forums.
c. On the scheduled date of sale, the Chancellor will clear the region completely of all objects before placing the region for sale.
c. The Chancellor can confer the responsibility of clearing the region on a CDS estate manager.

7) At the Chancellor’s direction, Rudeen must place the region up for sale in the For Sale By Owner group. The Chancellor is responsible for writing up the text for the sales notice and for giving it to Rudeen.

8 ) Money from the sale of the region shall remain in the general CDS account (Rudeen).

I believe that should address NFS and the grandfathered issue.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:16 pm
by Han Held

Is there any practical way we can swap out our full-price regions for grandfathered ones, maybe using the "for sale by owner" group? Or would we burn through too much money (moving fees, renaming fees) to get any savings from that?


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 4:32 am
by Lilith Ivory

Unfortunately grandfathered regions stay only as long grandfathered as they have the original owner. We tried a while ago and it was not even possible to transfer grandfathered regions from Sudane to Rudeen.

What we might need is a detailed emergency plan about how to move terraforming and buildings quickly from one of our non grandfathered regions to a grandfathered one without causing too much inconvenience to the citizens in both regions.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 8:16 am
by Han Held
Lilith Ivory wrote:

What we might need is a detailed emergency plan about how to move terraforming and buildings quickly from one of our non grandfathered regions to a grandfathered one without causing too much inconvenience to the citizens in both regions.

I agree. Thinking about that:

a)Do we have any sort of property line surveys from when the regions were put online? They might be useful for redrawing parcels once the regions' terraforming is moved.
b)Can Sudane provide us with or maintain an archive of raw files for each region? That way if we need to shuffle regions around, we can load the terrain that way.

Moving the items over is the tricky part, and I honestly have no idea how we can do that. I know that the Lindens are able to restore regions back to any arbitrary point in time, but that doesn't mean that they can restore (for example) CN's content over to LA (or vice versa). Unless someone knows better, I think we'd be stuck moving things over by hand.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 10:01 am
by Rosie Gray
Han Held wrote:

...a)Do we have any sort of property line surveys from when the regions were put online? They might be useful for redrawing parcels once the regions' terraforming is moved.
b)Can Sudane provide us with or maintain an archive of raw files for each region? That way if we need to shuffle regions around, we can load the terrain that way.

Moving the items over is the tricky part, and I honestly have no idea how we can do that. I know that the Lindens are able to restore regions back to any arbitrary point in time, but that doesn't mean that they can restore (for example) CN's content over to LA (or vice versa). Unless someone knows better, I think we'd be stuck moving things over by hand.

As far as I know, we would have to redraw the property lines again, whether or not we have a map of them now (not sure if we do, but I don't think so). Sudane has created RAW files on occasion, but no idea if she does any updates on them.

As for moving the 'stuff' from one sim to another - truthfully we would end up just losing some of it as nobody has permissions on it anymore. It would be a MASSIVE amount of work for those that can do the work, and every individual with a parcel would have to be willing to pick up all of their stuff and keep it in their inventory until the newly prepared parcels were ready.

I really do not think this is practical at all.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:15 am
by Sudane Erato
Lilith Ivory wrote:

Unfortunately grandfathered regions stay only as long grandfathered as they have the original owner. We tried a while ago and it was not even possible to transfer grandfathered regions from Sudane to Rudeen.

Unfortunately, and I say that with considerable frustration and even anger at LL and its changing policies, this is no longer true. Only a month ago LL announced a change of policy whereby a grandfathered region CAN be transferred to another owner, preserving the grandfathered tier rate.... for the payment to LL of a rather considerable extra fee (I think it's US$600 for a full region, but I don't remember exactly).

I can't begin to go into the anger I feel about this... the lost opportunities since 2010 (when tier was first raised) and since about 2012 when transfers were blocked. Add to that the complexity of the financial calculation of this new solution....

Sudane....................


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 3:42 pm
by Coop

Here's the thing about the grandfathered sims...they are cheaper. Builds or no builds, 100 USD/month is an incentive if you are talking money.

I'd much rather drop a RAW file and have the potential of rebuilding some builds than to keep a sim that is more expensive. Granted, now that they changed the policy you could sell one of the grandfathered sims for top dollar (I saw one that went for 1500 USD) and use the money to float tier.

If you were really worried about tier, I'd take some of the money socked away in the reserves and buy a grandfathered sim to replace one of the 'full price' ones. More money up front but cheaper in the long term.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 4:30 am
by Sudane Erato
Coop wrote:

If you were really worried about tier, I'd take some of the money socked away in the reserves and buy a grandfathered sim to replace one of the 'full price' ones. More money up front but cheaper in the long term.

There's something to be said for this... ultimately a savings of US$1200/year, or $3600/year if we did all three (minus the upfront one-time costs). But as Rosie points out... a HUGE amount of work for each sim. LL will not lift a finger to help us with this (transferring content) in any way.

And to that query earlier about RAW files... yes, I've captured them occasionally, but with no special schedule. So what I have now is probably fairly out of date. We could certainly set up a shared folder in G-Docs and save current versions.

Sudane.................


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 10:17 am
by Rosie Gray
Sudane Erato wrote:

... And to that query earlier about RAW files... yes, I've captured them occasionally, but with no special schedule. So what I have now is probably fairly out of date. We could certainly set up a shared folder in G-Docs and save current versions. ...

That sounds like a good idea Sudane. Could you generate copies of all 6 RAW files now, and perhaps every 6 months when the governments change (just to have a schedule). I would suggest that unless there were major changes on any of the regions that we could request a new RAW file for as backup, that this would be adequate.

On the general topic of buying a grandfathered, used sim and replacing one of our full price ones - I would like to know who is interesting in pursuing this undertaking. I believe we would need a detailed procedures plan before committing to this. Perhaps those advocating would like to draw one up and post it for discussion.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 11:02 am
by Sudane Erato

I just did, out of curiosity, a quick calculation on how we would stand now if all our sims were grandfathered.

Right now, we are 16 percentage points short of breakeven. We are at 63% occupancy and we need to be at 79% to break even.

If all our sims were grandfathered, breakeven would be at 65% occupancy. That's only 2% above where we are now.

God... that's a sobering thought. The work involved in doing the conversion would be huge.

And, I might warn everyone. LL has a track record of utterly absurd, unfair, nonsensical and illogical policy change decisions regarding tier. There is NOTHING to guarantee that they won't, somewhere's down the line, eliminate grandfathered pricing altogether. The only thing totally consistent about LL policy is their completely consistent disdain for the underpining of their revenues... the estate owners.

Sudane...............................


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 3:41 pm
by Widget Whiteberry

Following a conversation with Nolligan, where I repeated some thoughts that have been on my mind, I pulled together some numbers related to the another of the fiscal aspects of estate management. Early in 2015, in an effort to increase the numbers of citizens, Pat set the cost of acquiring parcels at $L1 per parcel. He asked the RA for a 3 month trial, which was granted.

So far as I can tell, the RA never revisited the question, and so, since approx March 9, the cost of acquiring a CDS parcel has been $1L.

I wondered, if parcel purchase prices had been set at one months tier, just how much income that decision would have cost the CDS between March 10 and the end of December 2015. There have been flurries of activities which have kept the EMs busy, but amounted to nothing; I did not count properties that were bought and then abandoned within 48 hrs, nor did I count citizen to citizen parcel transfers.

Using the Land Management reports, from March 10 through the end of May, I count 43 transactions. First month's tier on those 43 = L$61,200. From June through December, I count 83 transaction. First month's tier on those 83 = L$124,728. 2015 total = L$185,928.


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2016 12:32 pm
by Widget Whiteberry

If a region in the CDS fails to generate more than 75% of its monthly tier expense for more than three consecutive months, the Chancellor is empowered to take steps to sell the region, if he /she deems it in the best financial interests of the CDS.
The Chancellor will determine the sale price of the region based on the average market sale price for regions of that type at that time.

As occupancy percentage needed for breakeven is not uniform across all our regions, treating all regions alike does not seem wise:

  • NFS = 79.39%; CN = 72.44%; AM = 84.03%; LA = 83.85%; Mon = 78.31%; FDS = 79.06%; estate wide = 79.51%

The Treasurer, who is tasked by the RA to acquire a new region, is likely to be following "average market sale price for regions of that type at that time." If the RA makes the decision, perhaps informed by the Chancellor, the RA can require the Treasurer to provide the information and then determine action. Why add this to the Chancellor's responsibilities?


Re: The Responsible Estate Management Act (Revised)

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2016 12:52 pm
by Rosie Gray
Widget Whiteberry wrote:

The Treasurer, who is tasked by the RA to acquire a new region, is likely to be following "average market sale price for regions of that type at that time." If the RA makes the decision, perhaps informed by the Chancellor, the RA can require the Treasurer to provide the information and then determine action. Why add this to the Chancellor's responsibilities?

I agree that it would make sense that the Treasurer be the one to determine the selling price, perhaps confirming it with the Chancellor.