Shop rentals

If you were to have a sim and wanted to change it from residental to commerical. Would the rental permissions need to be the same?

that all depends what permissions you have set for residential. I believe commercial users may need extra permissions for selling, but as i said depends what permissions you already have. set up a shop for selling test products yourself, send in a alt and you may find the answers you seek.

As a renter of commercial Estate land I can tell you this:

Commercial land renters need as much ownership as they can get. We do need to be able to put a land description up, put the parcel up for Search, and maybe some media settings. If you own the sim, that would be no problem as you simple sell the parcels for example for 1 linden, so the renter has as ownership as they can get.

My own landlord puts the parcel up for sale for exaclty 1 months rent, after that you pay him per month that same amount. Easy as it gets I thought, but now one of the Estate managers is coming up with a rental box so we even get reminded to pay the rent

Ahh! Thanks to the both of you! I do have the sim and also rental boxes just wasnt sure about what permissions were needed (as extra) for commercial renters.

One more question -- is it a good idea to have pre-built improvements on the sim? Or let the renter do their own thing?

depends. are you doing individual plots that will be named by the vendor, or are you making a mall where everyone shares the space and mall name?

either way, it's nice to have all the buildings in an area uniform, whether they are connected or not.

Indeed depends.
Smaller vendors might like a shop they can put their stuff in, bigger ones just look for a place to put up their build. When I look at my parcel, its 4800 m2 double prim, and I would not like the Sim owner to have put up a store on that. I want tu use my own builds, and adapt them when more space is needed.

Bottomline: it's all about what kind of merchants you want to attract.