Managing Vertically Aligned Rental Properties?

I'm kind of confused about this, so if anyone could briefly fill me in or point me to a resource I'd appreciate it. I understand at a basic level the practice of dividing up property and selling it, and I understand to a point dividing up property and renting it. What I am confused about is how one who, say, owns a high rise, rents vertically aligned property.

Land in SL is just a proxy for prim resources, I understand that, but when you stack people you are putting them all on the same plot. How do you manage and monitor their prim use? I know it can be done, I see high rise rentals all the time. Are there scripts that enable it by, say scanning prims within a certain range? I thought maybe prims by owner, but then rentals seem to work more as group because people have roomates/partners, etc.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm not a slumlord, and I only "own" a small peice of land, but I am helping out in a community where they are considering adding small residences for people who don't want to own land, and it is kind of a sticking point on how to manage the resources.

You just go into the objects tab in your land menu. It will list all objects & owners on that block.

But, if you're going to charge rent, the easiest way to do it is to use one of the rental systems (Hippo & Apez come to mind, but there are more on the market). It manages the payments, prim usage, reminders, etc and they can be set up to alert you, by IM, if anyone's over their allotted prim amount.

If you are interested in offering each of your residents the ability to have their own media controllers, even though they are in the same parcel and stacked vertically, we (EML-Entertainments) sell a media system that has a screen with a controller incorporated, that can support up to 30+ screen/controllers per parcel. Each unit has its own open url list and comes with a selection of freeview channels as standard. If you give each resident a unit, then they can control and access the playlist themselves, or you can maintain control over the whole system yourself.

Give me a IM ingame and I'll be glad to show you the system operating, as I have described.

How does this work, without changing the media for everyone on the plot? And how much does this cost?

This system doesn't use land based media, it uses adjustable remote sensors, that when triggered by an avatar(s) that comes into range, will deliver the media information direct to that avatar, from that screen only. Anyone else at a different screen, gets different media information.

It is not related to parcels, or even who owns the land, as long as you can drop objects and run scripts locally, it works.

For a sim/land to utilise the system, somewhere on that sim/land will need to be a single prim 'server'. This is dropped (by the land owner, or deeded if group owned land), click and choose setup and the whole sim is enabled for the system. The servers only connect every screen on that sim to the serverside SL functions and do not interfer with any existing land based systems (parcel based), in fact they coexist. The servers have a range that covers a whole sim, although the response is a little slower, than is you had a server within 20mtrs.

The servers cost 5L$ and screen/player combination units start from 600L$ and all come complete with their own integral playlist and media controllers.

Could you please drop a landmark in my inventory so I can come take a look at it later?

There are two places we showcase this system (other than the many hundreds systems already deployed around SL), both are in my picks in Profile. EML-Entertainments (2nd floor, 1st floor stock, ground floor standard media players systems) and WBA-Advertising in 2 areas, 1 suporting standard media, and the 2nd supporting 9 screens playing movies on the ground floor, and on the 2nd floor a couple of music players in the same system.