Parcel Covenant

Last Updated: March 22, 2020

PAYMENT OF TIER

By renting land from Coral Estates, you agree to pay a weekly or monthly fee (otherwise known as tier) to CORAL ESTATES through the terminal located in the office on the CORAL ESTATES HQ sim, please see the following SLURL to visit the payment terminal.

Recurrence of this payment is weekly, or monthly as per your agreement with Coral Estates. Please note that unless prior arrangements have been made, within 24 hours of receiving notice of tier payment arrears, your land will be automatically locked and you will be IM'd by a member of staff to make payment. Failure to respond within the period of time specified by the staff member will be interpreted as your having abandoned the land, and it will be reclaimed and your items returned. The turnaround time for this is usually one day. Therefore, to avoid this, please ensure your tier is paid in a timely fashion.

IMPORTANT

Please arrange for the tier to be paid within 60 minutes of first renting the land, or it will automatically be reclaimed.

IF YOU DO NOT CONTACT A STAFF MEMBER TO PAY TIER, IT WILL BE RECLAIMED WITHOUT WARNING.

Failure to comply with either the obligation for regular payments or the rules set down in the Covenant can lead to the termination of your contract. We will have to reclaim your land and return your items without any monetary compensation.
If you decide to leave your land before the end of the current week or month's rental period, CORAL ESTATES will be unable to give you any refund on monies paid.

GENERAL RULES

1. Build your house such that it could fit into a residential area in RL!
2. Preserve some vegetation and keep it with the style of the sim you are living in!
3. Preserve the general style of the landscape when terraforming!
4. Respect your fellow residents privacy!
5. Do not raise your own fences (prims, or aggressive scripts) too high!
6. Use the resources of your sim in a fair way (watch the lag you might be causing)! NO BOTS, CAMPING OR SPLODERS ON SHARED LAND
7. Be nice to your neighbors! Remember: you want them to be nice to you, too!
8. No ban lines allowed. Land must be set to "public access".
9. No more than 3 platforms on land parcels 4096 and smaller.

BUILDING

* Flying houses and other large structures in the sky (skyboxes) are only allowed above 500m
* No skyscrapers (this is residential, not downtown)
* No houses "floating on water"; rocks created by you don't count as "land" ;) Exceptions to this rule might be possible in some of our themed sims.
* Don't build directly on the border of your property. Keep a distance that is in proportion with the height of your build.
* General rule of thumb is:
- a buildings height should be less than 2 times its distance from the parcel border
- the height of a wall should be less than 1.2 times the distance from this wall to the border
* If you absolutely NEED to build nearer to the border, ask the neighbor. If the neighbor agrees, you might build near the border on ONE side of your land. Get your neighbors agreement in writing: on a non-modifiable notecard that should show your neighbor as the creator of this notecard is best.
ATTN: the next owner of the land might not agree! If this happens, you would have to change the building.

If the sim you are living in, is not “themed”, the style in which you build is yours to decide.
We are not against tree houses or castles in general, but if you plan such a building please ask us before you erect them. Many prefab castles and tree houses sold in SL are way too large (especially too high) for smaller parcels of less than 10,000 sqm.
If you can make that possible in any way, please leave at least some 32 prims unused on your parcels! That makes it possible for other residents to fly over your land with a vehicle or to sail the waterways of CORAL ESTATES.

PRIVACY

Please preserve your neighbor’s privacy. No stalking, no spying or eavesdropping scripts. If someone does not want you on their land, please respect this wish. It should not be necessary to ban you for that.
NO BAN LINES ALLOWED ON THIS SIM, these are unsightly to your neighbors so please use other forms of security if you need it.
Security devices are acceptable on shared sims. Coral Estates provides free security orbs to tenants that want them. Ask any Coral Estates Staff for one.
If you absolutely don’t want someone on your land, ban him or her.
If you want only those in your group on your land, place a check mark in BOTH "allow public access" AND "allow group access"...this will keep anyone not in your group out, and also keep ban lines down.

LANDSCAPING

We put a lot of effort into setting up the initial vegetation on the land. This is maybe as important for the overall impression and beauty as the shape of the land. So please follow the following rules:
* You can delete the ones we planted. But then you have to put up your own instead. You do not have to create a forest! :) But put something green around your house. You will see, that you like it!
* If you place your own vegetation on the land, please preserve the general character of the vegetation on the sim. Don't fill your parcel with palms and tropical plants on sims which have initially been forested with needle trees or vice versa. Have a look around before you become a resident of CORAL ESTATES. We offer different styles of vegetation and landscape. Choose the one you prefer BEFORE you select your land.
If you ask, we will provide you with automatic planters that contain the original vegetation of the sim. It is easy to reforest large areas very efficiently with these devices.

TERRAFORMING(Shared Sims)

You, and your neighbors came here because you liked the landscape. Please keep it that way. Minor terraforming is allowed, but please consider your neighbors when doing so. If you need the land shape changing slightly to fit your house, please ask a member of Coral Estate Staff to help you.
* Don’t block rivers or other waterways; with prims or with scripted devices. There should always be some way for sailors to cross your parcel.
* Don’t build land with prims where there is none. No astroturf islands please unless you gain permission from CORAL ESTATE. * Don’t use prims (especially no megaprims) to circumvent limitations for terraforming! We, from the Coral estates Building Group might use them, to design the land. No resident should use them without asking first.

PARCEL USAGE

If not noted otherwise in any agreement between you and The CORAL ESTATES Group,on sims that are designated residential land, you can have a yard sale. No problem. (A yard sale means, that the owner is on the premises while it is going on. No week long sales of used goods.) You can throw a party. You can play a round of poker with your friends. You can even offer consulting and counseling services in a small scale.
* No shops.
* No clubs.
* No malls.
* No casinos.
* No scripted weapons.
* No large advertisements (billboards).
* No *bingo, Tringo, SLingo ...

We are not adverse to any of these; but not in a residential neighborhood. If you need land for these purposes, ask. We always have to offer some nice parcels on one of our commercial sims especially for these purposes.

LAG CONTROL

All residents and all parcels in one sim share the resources of one server. If this server has to work too hard and can’t keep up with the demands of the residents currently in it, “lag” happens. Lag often is not local. Too many scripts running in one parcel, can lag the whole server down and every AVI in it will experience it.

Nobody likes lag. But sometimes it is hard to foresee what causes lag. In theory it is simple: scripts, a large number of large textures, prims (especially textured ones) and many AVIs coming together in one sim cause lag.It is not that easy to determine the causes of lag though.

The following rules help to keep lag down and be nice to your neighbors:
* Keep the number of guests on your parcel in proportion to the parcels size! What this means? For example: If you don’t own half the sim, don’t throw parties with more than 20 guests regularly. If you want to host a large party, ask us. We have special venues available for all residents.
* Don’t set up too many devices with lagging scripts on your land! (For the experts: a large number of scripts with a large number of listeners is bad.) We actually can check this with some tools. Ask someone from the team when you suspect lag nests in your sim.
* Try to minimize textures on your parcel especially, when they can be seen outside your building. Use 256*256 sized textures if possible, 512*512 maximum.

GRIEFING, CONFLICTS & LITTERING

If you have the feeling, that some other resident of Second Life is attacking or griefing you, please try to gather some evidence and send an IM to one of our estate managers in addition to filing an abuse report (if this is appropriate). If someone did litter your land with junk for example, select the object(s), choose "Edit" and make a snapshot of the screen with the GUI showing. That way we can see the owner of the object(s) in question.

Please send those reports quickly after the incident. In most cases we can't do that much, if the incident happened hours or days in the past.

Please note, that we can not do anything in the case of neighborly disagreements, when there is no clear violation of the Covenant or a violation of the ToS. Coral estates cannot and will not act as a court of arbitration.

Sometimes griefers or careless people will litter your land with "stuff". Please make it a habit to check for such "stuff" regularly (this is easily done with the About Land command) and delete or return it. This will not only make sure that Coral estates is a more cleanly estate. It might improve performance on your sim, too (reduce lag) and leave more prims free for you to create nice buildings with.

APPLICABILITY

This Covenant is applicable to all sims which are part of Coral Estates, which are sold and rented as individual parcels and which are not declared "commercial" or "mixed". In sims, which are "commercial" or "mixed" (some commercial use, with residential parcels, too), shops are allowed. Clubs are not prohibited here, too.

In the case of sims, which are fully owned by a single owner, this owner can ask us if the sim can be used commercially. We might agree, depending on the nature of the store and its setup. It is paramount for us, that such a store doesn't "spread lag" to other sims. If a store is changed after our assessment, we might retract our agreement for any or no reason and the store might have to cease operation.

Some sims don't fall under the Covenant at all, even though they are part of The CORAL ESTATES Estate. These are sims, where no land is sold or rented at all and which are operated as part of the infrastructure of our estate. The management of The CORAL ESTATES Group decides what is possible here. We will allways try to make sure that neighboring sims are not influenced negatively by these installations - which are intended to be enjoyed by all Coral estates residents.

IMPORTANT ADDITIONS TO COVENANT:

As of April 18, 2015 There will be no grace period to pay rent, we have other options in place if you need an extension but you must contact us the day your rent is due, we will do everything we can to help you.

For past due account 1 day or more, there will be a late fee ranging from 250 to 1000 lindens, if there is no communication on your part, the land will be locked. There will be no exceptions without prior communication from you.

This in return will free our time to provide you with even better customer service, we very much appreciate having you and will continue to look for ways to satisfy your needs.

CONSEQUENCES

This covenant constitutes a contract between you and The CORAL ESTATES Group. You agree to it by becoming a resident on a private sim owned by The CORAL ESTATES Group. Breaking these rules or the TOS of Second Life constitutes a breach of contract. This might lead to the termination of the contract.

We never declare a termination of contract lightly. In most cases we will issue a warning or a polite reminder first or we might reclaim the land temporarily to remedy the source of the violation (usually that is the case with ban lines, aggressive security scripts, destructive terraforming and buildings in violation of the Covenant). Some violations will result in termination of contract without warning, though. This is the case with violent attacks (and ... No, we will not discuss who attacked whom first!) and any breach of the Second Life TOS.

Termination of contract because of a violation of the Covenant becomes effective immediately. There are no refunds in this case. Depending on the violation you might be banned from The CORAL ESTATES Estate, too.
CEO Kristaki Hudson support@coralestates.net

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