Sim ownership is a beast of its own

Salacity History Part 9...

The occasional tensions and frustrations with our sim neighbors at the original Misfits shopping district continued to be a problem. The solution? Why not buy/lease a whole sim for ourselves?

(To be clear: it's not possible in SL to fully own land outright. Even if you buy land directly from Linden Lab, there will always be fees and maintenance costs that essentially amount to Linden Lab still "owning" the rights to the land. Unless they set up some system where people can host their own sims 100% free of charge, real estate in SL will always be, at most, a leasing agreement.)

There are many companies in SL that broker real estate; you can "buy" parcels of all sizes, homesteads, and full sims. Buying a sim means that you have total control over everything about the sim: all of the rights and settings are up to you, and whomever you designate as co-owners or property managers. 

We managed to find a full sim with 20K prims allowed (not the max, which saved us some Lindens) for a very reasonable price—not all that much more than we were already paying for the four parcels we already had for commercial and residential use. So we divided the sim into fourths, with ¼ sim devoted to our new shopping district (and the rest set up to be residential space for the co-owners). The Misfits Shopping District now had a (HUGE) new home, with plenty of space for new stores to rent if they wanted to.

What an exciting turn of events! Of course, with it came more responsibilities. We needed to sub-let those new store spaces, or we were stuck covering the difference in cost ourselves. But with the space we had, we could eventually end up paying less for this sim than we had for the parcels we were leasing before. A win for everyone.

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