Land Taxes

[Canadane]

It's against the rules, but the GMs can't possibly police everything well enough to catch everyone

They can with your help! If you see something, say something!
Only you can prevent forest fires realtors.

[Sylfaein]

They can with your help! If you see something, say something!
Only you can prevent forest fires realtors.

Very true. The GMs WILL respond. Spoke to one just the other day about a jerk trying to hock a medium in PF for 40M.

We need a better way to report it, though. It seemed the only way to report in-game was through the harassment pipeline... WTB "Other ToS Violation" option.

[Dustytome]

Land flippers don't tend to hold onto land, they buy it and immediately go to resell it. The tax would only affect those using the plots. I'm not sure if SE actually does anything as I've reported the same individual selling on multiple accounts/alts and they continue to do so. They need to make it harder to simply drop the land into someone's lap. I'd even like to see them go as far as flagging an account that's flipped a house to be unable to purchase housing other than an apartment or an fc room for up to a year if not permanently. Remove all land associated with the account and in addition they cannot own FC land while the account is flagged. Ownership will always pass them over in the event of an FC leader not returning and they will be ineligible to be directly handed leadership.

[Zigabar]

No. Stop trying to punish the players for SE's mistake. I don't agree with house flippers, but taxing will only punish the legitimate owners.

[StouterTaru]

If you want to stop flipping, it's as simple as making the reverse auction work the way it was originally intended; start with prices so high that houses don't get snatched up immediately. If a small house starts at 50M, nobody is going to flip it, and they end up selling for the price that the player base values them at.

[MomomiMomi]

If you want to stop flipping, it's as simple as making the reverse auction work the way it was originally intended; start with prices so high that houses don't get snatched up immediately. If a small house starts at 50M, nobody is going to flip it, and they end up selling for the price that the player base values them at.

Yeah, as I've also stated countless times, this would solve flipping. The prices should be starting at about 10x their current max value and drop to their current minimum.

[Penthea]

This would hurt rule abiding players more than house flippers. It would certainly force a lot of players to do content they may not necessarily be interested in or even like just to keep up with the tax.

If SE are serious about stamping down on house flippers the first thing they need to do is make it as easy to report as RMT activity. The next thing is to bring in positive features that discourage or devalue house flipping, such as more wards, more tenancy slots and introduce tenancy for apartments. More restrictions hurts everyone.

[-BlueGreen-]

Interesting, I had been given the impression from others and from reading various sources that there were cases of entire wards being completely owned by a few individuals with most houses sitting completely empty and such.

If houses aren't being simply held by potential house flippers, then yes, a land tax would do little to help the situation.

Maybe with the datacenter move SE will have the resources to actually expand wards, but I have my doubts that approach would be scale-able enough giving the extreme difference in server populations.

For instance, the number of wards on Coeurl seems to be just about right. I recently watched a large get demolished by the auto timer and sit for around 3 days before someone finally bought it. Mediums come up frequently enough and smalls sometimes sit around enough to bottom out in pricing.

With SB, I expect the increase in active players to cause a short-term crunch on housing, but in the long run, the entire extra housing area with all of its wards and sub divisions will add an incredible amount of housing to a server which already doesn't 100% sell out on a regular basis.

I don't know if their infrastructure is set up in such a way to work like this, but instead of adding more wards to servers like Coeurl, they could just give those to the bigger servers and smaller servers probably wouldn't hurt for it.

Granted, that's already been suggested several times, so probably not much point in discussing this topic any further unless someone wants to come in and say that empty, unused houses actually are a problem.

[Acidblood]

Besides, it even opens the opportunity to make the auto-demolition a bit more friendly. Instead of a straight 45-day auto-demolition, house owners might get an escrow account with their house in which they can deposit up to 6x the 30-day tax.

This is the main thing I would like to see, as currently, going on holiday (or some other away from home / the internet activity) for more than about a month at a time makes it hard to keep a house up... being able to pay in advance for an extended period would be very useful.

I also like the idea of a land tax in general, and while the amounts may have to be tuned, it is a good way of making people think twice about buying a house just because it's there (and may not be later) vs. buying a house because they actually want to use it.

[Yuumei]

I disagree with OP.

We house owners already pay tax in RL dollars to SE.
We must maintain our sub even if we wish to take a short break from the game or are unable to log in due to issues like hospitalization, military conscription (stuck in barracks or deployed overseas), busy with work or burnout.

Personally i did not log into the game for over 30days but my sub remains paid in 6 mth blocks continuously. This is so i have a home to return to in Eorzea when i wish to adventure again.

The tax is nothing but an annoyance to rich players but please stop with ideas aimed at punishing house owners in general due to actions of a few.

It has already been suggested before: restrict house ownership to 1 per account (per server) and all alts on said account share access to the house (if on same server). If folks want to go multi-account to flip houses then let them pay for it in RL sub dollars.

Thank you.