I'll add my horror story here about renting and what's "not" right to do.
Around December of last year, I met a friend. Both of us being homeless, he was nice enough to take the iniative to rent a 512 plot of land, put up a freebie house and invited me to share it with him (strictly platonic). As time goes by, you know you always want more so we increased our rental land gradually. We shared the rent equally for a couple months and the lot was set to group owned so I had full priveledges there and we shared priviledges thru our friend list as well.
By the end of January, he stopped playing... I couldn't bare to give up my home even though financially things were tight, so I found ways to squeek out the monthly rent on my own. I eventually took on another addition to my lot. Funny how you find a way to do it when you really, really want something.
I'm the kind of person that will not stop until everything is perfect the way I want it, so when I get decorating and landscaping ideas, I'll go without sleep until I'm done. Right after I added my last parcel and made a nice garden and cemetary area (hey, I'm the gothy type), the land manager asked me to take the adjoining lot that wasn't renting so fast at a nice deal, so I took that too. One always needs prims. I finished my project and spents hours walking through, thinking if there's anything that I could improve and generally just enjoying the result of my work.
THEN, a couple of nights later, I get a group IM from the land owners saying that we all had to move because they were going to redevelop the land in a different way. Needless to say, those of us online were distraught over it. Then a few minutes later, I was told that myself and a couple others on my side of the sim could stay. They could just do what they wanted to do on the remaining land. So... I breath a sigh of relief and go about my night.
A couple hours later, I'm off visiting a friend, I get another group IM that we have to go and within seconds I get a partial refund of my months rent and all my items auto-returned. Not only was I devastated at losing my home that I had put so much time and work into, it took me days before I found all of "my" belongings in my inventory because they got packed into a couple different bundles. This is not to mention the castle, stone wall, waterfall, and a few pieces of furniture that got returned to my former room mate whom I hadn't even heard from in months. With some advance notice, I could have picked up everything one by one, sorting it as I went. I'm just lucky that I purchased and placed most of the furnishings myself.
And this land wasn't even sold. There was no need whatsoever to boot us all without notice. The land is still owned by the same group though they've changed the name of it now, I imagine to make it more attractive to potential renters. What they ended up doing was submerging a great deal of it and formed into only four lots with mega-prim allowances at a tune of 25k per month rental. The last time I went there only two lots had been rented. This was greed in my opinion, that you can't give your current tenants a 30 day notice when you don't even have a land deal hanging in the balance. I was hurt and angry and cried for a long time that night for my loss.
I was lucky to have a partner at this time, that surely didn't care if I just moved in with him. But, after a couple of weeks I got a lot on his sim because I wanted a place where I could feel free with my tastes and decor... so we just go to whichever home we feel like going when we are together.
Sorry this was such a long story, but it feels better now that I've ranted about it.
