Group question regarding renting land

I have a nice 1024 sq m flat green mainland waterfront parcel which I don't really want to sell but I don't want to lose either It's on a new Class 5 sim, pretty quiet and minimal lag. You can see images on my Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/9341489@N07/

I was thinking I might rent it so at least the tier payments are covered. Since having a tenant is a new scenario to me, I wondered if some more experienced landowners might give me some advice?

1. I assume that creating a group where I am the owner and the tenant is an ordinary member is the right way to go? Will this mean I can give them building rights to the land so they can customise it to their liking? (I've never set up a group before so I know virtually nothing about it ...)

2. At the moment, the land is occupied by a garden which I created. Would it be better to just put up privacy hedges around the parcel to show the boundaries and create some enclosed personal space, removing everything inside? Or would it be better to put up the privacy hedge and add a simple low prim house on the site so the tenant can set up home straight away? The parcel only has 234 prims so not much to play with, unfortunately.

3. Would L$500 per week be a reasonable rent for such a parcel? I'd rather charge below market rate and cover tier than try to get the maximum rent possible.

4. I don't really want to put a rental box on the property so how would the tenant pay the rent? Would it be better to ask for the rent weekly / fortnightly / or monthly. I could perhaps offer a discount if a tenant pays for a month upfront.

I'm sure more questions will surface later but thanks for any help

Elfrida

You will want to create an alt and then setup the group, you need two people in a group or the group will go poof (you get notification, it's not an instant thing).

Yes you can give build permissions when you have the land deeded to a group.

A fair rental price you'll have to find out for yourself, I don't know how much land you own so I don't know whether you're paying USD$5 for the extra 512, or USD$8 for the 1024 or whether it's estate land. Selling L$1600 a month should bring in just over USD$5, for example.

If it's just one plot you can ask for the tenant to pay your avatar, just make sure you keep track of payments and keep your tenant informed.

I don't know about the house and the hedge, some tenants like to put their own house on a plot.

Here ya go read up on this thread
/327/0a/262861/1.html

good luck!

I'd create a specific tenant Role and go through each Ability carefully to really decide what they should be allowed to do (like maybe "Invite People to this Group", etc.). (In fact, when I do this, I also do surgery on the "Everyone" role to remove the "Pay group liabilities..." ability, at least.) Getting these abilities set appropriately is tricky, and there's no one right answer that covers all rental situations. (A detailed discussion of this might be a good wiki article, actually.)I only rent out sky builds, so this may not apply: I usually offer a new tenant a selection of low-prim builds that will fit on the rented parcel, or they can use/build their own. In my limited sample, about half want the space to build and half want one of the pre-builts, so if that's anything to go on, offering the choice is pretty important. And yeah: they will run out of prims; on a parcel that size, with no other prims in the sim to use for augmenting the count, this is likely to be a source of churn.(Sorry, no idea. I charge considerably less, but I'm not offering waterfront--nor ground level at all. From what little I've seen, L$500/wk seems to be in the ballpark.)But why not a rental box? It does kinda waste a prim, but it makes everything automatic. Otherwise you'll have to keep your own records, send out your own reminders, check your transaction history to see if you were paid while you weren't in-world... a lot of bookkeeping to do manually. As for period, I think weekly works fine: especially while starting out, both you and the renter may want to keep the commitment time short. Also, renters are more likely to be sensitive to the total amount of money they're paying at the moment than they are to the rate, so the monthly discount probably wouldn't be a big draw.

Many thanks for your helpful replies, Qie, Morgaine and Ciaran.

I'm going to mull this over carefully before I do anything but your tips have been very interesting.Thanks especially for the link to the other thread, Morgaine. It gives me a lot to consider.

I'm never going to be a big landowner letting lots of units but I don't want to let this one go because it's a nice parcel and, despite looking around, I haven't found one as nice that wasn't very expensive to buy or rent.

Hopefully someone else will like it enough to rent it

Elfrida

Groups are great fun to play with. With a combination of a group and the land settings you can give them as much freedom or as little as you'd like - from the simple ability to rez objects to terraforming.



No idea, sorry. I do know there's a LOT of empty land out there, so having the value added by the garden or a nice house might be an attraction. It might not be a bad idea to highlight the boundaries - I'm so used to running around with the land boundaries turned on I've forgotten what it's like not to know! And I think 234 prims is plenty to play with. But I'm incredibly cheap where prims are concerned.



I've been looking at 1024 plots to purchase, and several of the land sellers rent lots as well. The rates I've seen tend to run between L$475 and L$700, with L$500 usual.



My first rental was a skybox, with payable either weekly or monthly. The monthly rate was 4x the weekly, so for each monthly payment I got a couple of bonus days. I almost always paid monthly, though if I were to rent now I'd start with a week to see how we got on. I always paid my landlord directly - I never asked how he kept track. With just one tenant, notes in their profile or a notecard in your inventory would probably work fine.

Thanks Nic - that's very helpful

Elfrida