Land Rental

I email this to Daniel per his request in tonight's focus group but told him I would post it here for open discussion.

My idea is to provide a rental interface in the land tools as a companion to the selling interface. It works by accepting a rental amount (in lindens) and a time frame (in days? hours?) set by the parcel owner.

The land then shows as bright green (rentable) or white (rentable and for sale) on the map. The map icon can even display the parcel size, amount and time frame as it currently does the selling information.*

Rent will need to be added to the pie menu. Selecting it will grant the renter all ownership rights, other than the ability to set the land for sale, for the specified time period. If the land is set for sale at the time it is rented, the sale availability will be suspended for the duration of the lease.

The owner can reclaim the land at any time; however, the renter's prorated, or maybe full, fee is automatically refunded from the owner's account on reclaimation. If the owner cannot cover the refund, they'll not be able to reclaim the land for the duration of the lease or until their account is sufficiently funded.

Renewal is something I haven't thought through very well. If I were renting a parcel under this system, I'd hate to risk losing it with no automatic renewal available. But it might seem misleading to show a timeframe and then have the lease suddenly renew unannounced to the renter.

Here's the kicker for Linden Lab. With this feature in place, estate owners won't need the ability to set parcels for sale and have them show up for sale on the map when they're not really. Estate lords can simply spread a "purchase price" over the duration of the lease and be able to collect it along with the "tierage" they're charging for the occupancy. These will appear on the map as bright green parcel for rent without any possibility of confusion or abuse. One Better: Covenants can be tied to rental rather than sale and will be as effective on mainland parcels as they are estates.

*disclaimer - I am not suggesting, nor will I ever advocate, that the For Sale feature be removed from the land tools in favour of only allowing the ability for parcel owners to rent.

Good idea, i hope they do one day.

I found myself nodding and agreing wholeheartedly until it got to where I couldn't reclaim the land until I pro-rated the rent back. That totally negates my policy that breaking certain rules forfeits the lease. People are less likely to break the rules if there's more risk than just getting evicted (ie. they lose the money paid into rent). I've never had to evict someone yet (and hope I never do), but I don't want to have that kind of refund pollicy forced upon me.

Rentals integrated into the client is an EXCELLENT idea, and one that I've suggested to a couple of Lindens myself. Could this be put up for a feature vote, if it hasn't already? I'm not sure if I can do it as I've already voted hehe.

Whatever changes we propose should be quick and easy to implement.

As a consumer looking for land to rent, I think this is an outstanding idea. I wish it was implemented yesterday!

By the way, I think the refund policy is fine as long as it is for not breaking the terms of the lease. In other words, if the tenant is following all the lease terms and the landowner decides to sell the land, then the tenant should be entitled to a refund. The tenant should also be entitled to right of first refusal and a 30 day notice. If the tenant breaks the terms of the lease then no refund should be given.

I hope the Lindens read this and act on it.

The only problem with a 30 day notice is that most lease terms aren't 30 days but 7 days. In other words, if you're giving me 7 days notice regarding how long you're going to stay, why should I be forced to give you 30 days notice to the fact that you can no longer stay? That's not really fair.

I would perfer to just have a lease term that can be set to any length of time.. 7 days, 30 days, whatever the tenant wants. Then also a checkbox to not allow any more renewals. Then if I check this box, it notifies the tenant immediately thus giving notice. I guess this would be an "until the end of the current renewal" notice, which is equally fair on both sides of the arrangement.

In this way, if a tenant wanted to be gauaranteed to be able to stay for a long term, he could negotiate a long-term lease and pre-pay. Then, on the flipside, if a landlord wanted to retain the right to sell their land on a second's notice, they could negotiate only shorter lease terms of 7 days or so. Then, the market will decide what is appropriate. If a landlord is very rigid on short or long term leases only, that landlord won't get much business.

It would be nice to also be able to seperate the length of the lease from the payment so that say, you could agree to a 30 day lease billed in 7 day increments. In a world without credit histories (or even really identities) though, it would be nice to have some kind of protection built in which forced the tenant to comply with an obligation that they'd entered into in this fashon.

I do agree about right of first refusal if the landlord decides to sell the land though. Maybe the landlord could be allowed to enter the sale price during the tenant's final lease term. During this time, the tenant would be the only person who could buy it. But then if they decided not to by the time their lease was up their objects would autoreturn and anyone would be able to purchase at that point.

I suppose the refund could be optional at the time of leasing. It might makes more sense to offer refunding in a mall environment but not in residential.

The feature was added to my original thinking after listening to concerns of estate owners being able to "sell" parcels to people then ban them for no reason and "resell" the parcel to the next unsuspecting victim. To me, that's no different from a mall manager allowing me to pay a rental unit then kicking me out of the group and returning all my prims the next day.

Honestly, I think that kind of behaviour will never be any more rampant than it is now simply because the population won't tolerate it. You can't conduct such a scam successfully in an environment where word spreads as quickly as it does here.

Still, even if they break the rules and are being honestly evicted, it only seems greedy to me for the landlord to want to keep their full rent amount when the property will be rented to someone else. Yet while I am rambling, I'm not a landlord or estate owner. That's why I put this out for discussion.

this does seem like a good idea and estate owners will still have the advantage of giving residents a zoned community where no one can come and put up a big mall or ugly signs near your home.

why any one would rent on the main land is perplexing to me any way when you can rent in any number of private sims and not pay any more then you would to "own" on the main land

i do see a big problem if however main land renters are able to under cut private sim owners
but then again in a private sim you get superior land and no worries about ugly builds next to yours

A small suggestion. At the time of the first renting it should be possible for the renter to be given a notecard containing any rules for the land automatically from the rental interface. THis would be particularly important in zoned or controlled communities and would be a nice way to gaurantee that the person who rented the land did indeed recieve a copy of the rules.

I don’t think keeping the remaining rent paid after kicking someone out for breaking rules set up by the group that they are renting from is greedy at all.

It is part of the structure people agree to when they rent. It is also a way to encourage people to follow the rules and to really mean it when they initially agree to follow them. The keeping of the rent money also covers the time it might take to find another renter, so the land lord isn't with out their income just because someone wasn't able to hold up their end of the agreement.

The “we keep the rent if your bad and get kicked out” rule is not new, or out of line in my opinion and I agree to it when ever I rent mall space.

It is even in the rules and terms of agreement that I helped write up for a mall and two private islands that I manage. It has only come up once in the past few months, where we needed to remove a person from our land for their unwillingness to comply with the rules they agreed to in the first place.

Theo.

This is my understanding of how covenants will work for estate owners when they're (re)granted the ability to set parcels for sale and have them show up on the large map.

Thanks for the clarification Theo. I still think an optional automatic refund feature would be nice to have. It gives potential renters a choice between landlords who voluntarily can't keep their money if things don't work out and ones who insist that they be trusted to not take advantage while offering no security to the customer. The owner of course still owns the parcel and have the final say over it's use either way.

There are people out there who think it's great fun to ruin everyone else's second life for hours and days on end, just for the dirty thrill of it.

Usually under the banner of 'it's just a game, get over it' or some such expression.

If someone clearly, intentionally ruins the experiences of my other residents in my sim, they will get the auto-eject bum's rush to the door, and no, I'm not refunding one single $L in that case.

I hear 'mute' works pretty good too.

And since it's just a game, they can get over it.



As for how I treat decent people, just ask any of my West Trade Imports customers.

Assuming we get the Lindens to adopt any of these proposals, that's the proposal we'll all be stuck with forever. And we'll all be stuck with the same thing.

I suggest something more general:

1. Change the architecture of SL so that a land parcel is treated like any object, and thus it would have an inventory, and the inventory could hold notecards, scripts, textures, etc., just like prims.

2. Add a small collection of functions to the scripting language that allow various forms of alienation (sale, rental, lease), occupation, and compensation. Then let the scripters try to develop and sell different ways of doing these things, and let the market reward the good ideas and punish the bad ones.

I hesitate to us a RL example, but the lines between RL and SL are blurring more and more every day.

When you lease land or a building in the physical world, you not only pay for your month in advance, but when you leave willingly or not, you are out that money.

As much as I am poopooing the automatic refund part of this idea… I LOVE the idea that we might be able to see what land is for sale or for rent on the maps. I use my map all the time, and think it is very useful, and can become even more useful in the future.

*Nods in agreement*

Not an easy area to tackle. I am all up for anything that 'insures' the genuine resident, but I would be against anything that opens the door to another form of griefing. With no fear of losing their money, I could see this being used to piss people off. Enough time is currently spent dealing with nobheads, let's not give them another toy to play with. The time is better spent helping out genuine residents.

And you could apply texture to it?

Feel free to poopoo as long as you don't mind me poopooing your poopoo. It's not our decision to make anyway. All we can do is bat these ideas back and forth hoping some bored Linden will notice.

For performance reasons, probably not. But, maybe the scripting language would let you post a sign, and you could display one thing (using a texture) when the property is being offered for rent, and another when it is not.

This is an excellent idea and I would love to see it implemented in the client. The current mechanisms for renting land in SL are just to clumsy, labour-intense and prone to unfair handling fron both sides of the contract.

Let me just see if I get this right, please.
To have this in the client we would need only small changes in the About Land dialogue (especially if we can agree on a default for the renting period; say a week):


Usage could be simple


I am not sure if I really would like the ability for the owner to be able to reclaim the land "at any time". As a land developer I probably would be in the more powerfull situation here, but still ... When I compare this to an RL situation, I would not want to rent an app or house, where the landlord would be able to put me on the street any time, day or night at his personal whim.

This might be a little different in SL. It is never cold and doesn't rain. But having all my property "sent back" to my Lost and Found (unlinked probably) is not a nice experience either.

The same conditions would apply, if the tenant would loose the land immediately as soon as a payment is overdue. Kicking the tenant out the very same day would seem a little harsh. Maybe 2 days deferment period?

Or as a compromise suggestion: what if the auto-renewal payment would happen not after 7 days but after 5 days.
???