Renting

I have been working on constructing an open air mall and would like to rent shop space. It seems that the forum threads that touch on this issue assume that the reader already has the basic information. How do I define the area and/or building space to be rented? Do I need to subdivide the land for each space? Is the Hippo system appropriate for this use? How do I assign/control prim use for the rented premises? Are there construction issues I should keep in mind when creating the buildings in order to rent the space? Are there other things I should be aware of? Thank you in advance for your help in this matter.

>>How do I define the area and/or building space to be rented?

You can use 'subdivide' to section off bits of a land parcel (use View Property Lines, ctrl alt shift P toggles it) Note that prims will correspond to parcel size.



>>Do I need to subdivide the land for each space?

Not really. You can just 'assign' prims and hope that nobody will use more than they are supposed to. However, in practise people tend to either accidentally or unfairly exceed this limit quick.


>>Is the Hippo system appropriate for this use?

I've never used it, but I'm pretty sure it is. Check some more...


>>How do I assign/control prim use for the rented premises?

Either by assigning a parcel, or just coming to agreement - and then deeding your land to a group. You can then invite renters to the group, allowing them permission to create prims on the land.


>>Are there construction issues I should keep in mind when creating the buildings in order to rent the space?

Yes, many. Mostly though, you want easy access and plenty of room for avatar 'camera' angles - that view we all have from over our head. Some might argue that doing 'just another mall' might be a bad thing - if you can avoid this via architecture, design or whatnot it's worth a try.


>>Are there other things I should be aware of?

Yeah... first off, for the time you spend, unless you are making a humoooongous mall it's probably not going to be 'worth the money' whatsoever. Second - once you have tenants, you are gonna be logging in a lot. Even when you don't want to.

Expect to be pestered, shorted on rent, mistreated, you-name-it. If you *still* love it... go for it. Reconsider starting up if there's a good chance you'll be sick of it in three weeks - others will build their dreams in your mall, and will be counting on you.

Last of all - good luck

The best way to get the most of the basic information you will need is to go out (create an alt if necessary) and rent mall space. Set up a shop, see what works for you and what doesn't.

In residential rentals, it is common to subdivide the plot into subplots and rent each subplot individually. For commercial rentals, where rental units are densly packed and often stacked vertically, this is often not practical or possible.

I use the HippoRent system and heartily endorse it. It doesn't do everything, but it does make manegment much easier

There is a different answer for this for every breath you take. There is no substitute for paying attention to what is going on on your property

Use as few prims as possible

Yes. yw.

A couple things about creating subdivided parcels. First, that will achieve automatic *accounting* of prims on the parcel, but it isn't enough to *enforce* the prim limit on the parcel because all land in the same sim with the same owner shares a pool of prims. To force the prim counts to correspond to the individual parcels they must have different owners; assuming this is Mainland, this can be done by using a separate Group for each parcel. That means creating a lot of Groups at L$100 each, and each avatar has a limit of 25 groups to which they can belong. That does have the advantage, though, of making it easy to give the renters lots of permissions on their parcels without their being able to mess up any of the other renters.

Second, each parcel gets its own name, description, and traffic count, and can have its own landing point and listing in Places. So if there's just one parcel, all tenants share in the traffic counts, but traffic is relatively less important in the new Search than the wording of parcel names and descriptions, so tenants may value the ability to set that text individually for their units.

Of course, if the units are vertically stacked, using separate parcels won't work anyway.