Real estate (Second Life)

Virtual real estate on Second Life, an online world owned and operated by Linden Lab since 2003, is used by residents when they require permanent in-world storage of the content they have created or otherwise own. Both Linden Lab and Second Life's Residents make money from Second Life through the trading and use of virtual real estate.

Land on the Second Life grid can either be on the Mainland or on an Estate. Land can be owned either by an individual avatar or by a group. Estate land can be created whenever a user pays the start-up fee. Mainland comes into existence only when Linden Lab's management decides to create some. Linden Lab tends to be cautious about doing so, in order not to drive the price of existing land down too far. New mainland is usually auctioned off to dealers who subdivide it and sell it to other avatars, although Linden Lab does hold on to some Mainland for its own use.

The grid is made of identically sized regions (also called "sims"), each 65,536 m² in size. Each standard sim can support up to 15,000 prims. There is a limit to how many avatars can be on a sim, depending on the sim type. Mainland sims can support a maximum of 40 avatars, full regions can support up to 100 avatars, homestead regions can support up to 20 avatars, and openspace regions can support up to 10 avatars. On private estates, estate managers can set the maximum number of allowed avatars to less than the hard maximum.

An estate is an isolated group of one or more (usually contiguous) regions, all controlled by an estate owner who rents land to users. The estate owner pays a monthly "tier" fee to Linden Lab for the use of the space: the standard rate is $295/month for a "Private Region." Sometimes Linden Lab makes regions available for free for special projects. The servers are owned by Linden Lab itself, not by the estate owner (although there is one famous exception to this rule: IBM's many regions are housed on IBM-owned hardware behind IBM's firewall.)

In 2006, Linden Lab introduced the OpenSpace or void sim, which allows a limited number of objects, and offers a limited amount of underlying CPU power. Each of four void sims is limited to 3,750 prims instead of the usual 15,000, and there are four void sims created by vertically stacking them in the memory space normally taken by one full 15,000 prim server. They are used for lightweight purposes such as open water for sailing, open land for parks, or other 'light uses' where land area is more important than prims or processor power for scripts. These regions are available only on private estates, and they cost one fourth as much as a regular sim. They are not always used as voids: sometimes they are used as parks or even as residences. One real estate dealer who specializes in these sims refers to them as "High-Area regions" while marketing them to avatars who want a lot of empty space around their home.

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Wikipedia