Question about renting apartments.

My wife and I are going to build some apartments for people to rent. We both have teir that we want to use for this. Only thing is, I noticed is that if we set the land to group, the tennants would be equally sharing in any dwell or other payments paid to the group. Not the rent though as thats set up differently. But if the tennants are not in the group even as regular members, we'd have a problem with thier furniture and other objects being returned, as setting the land no-build outside the group seems to be the only option to avoid a popular griefing method. And ofcoure if the land is not set to group, but one owner, either my wife or I would have to cover all the tier for it, which we wanted to share. Any ideas on how we can set this all up properly? Assuming this all makes any sense the way I described it.

Morlee Moreau

I understand this perfectly as I have wrestled with this very issue. And I ended up just saying ok, tenants, you can get your share of dwell from the group, that's your bonus. So they collect some extra dwell from the entire group's land parcels on all sims, and that's attractive.

But I didn't do that with all land and groups because it really is a big gift in places and I notice other landlords don't do this.

So what to do? Well one thing is to have just a merchants' group without the land in it that the land is set to under "set group" to hold the prims. But as you rightly point out, if a land is group-owned, the land automatically sets to that group that is the owner, and the menu greys out, and you can't toggle the "set group" switch to another group, say, to just a tenants' group to keep prims on the land.

I noticed some landowners are telling merchants to set to a group that in fact isn't the setting of the group on the land, but they do that just to keep people in one group so when they go around clicking on their prims, they can see if they are set to the group designated.

But really, this is a significant obstacle not only for renting but building and doing group projects. I've written the Lindens about this over and over with no response. I even put it in bug reports at first because it seemed to be a bug to me. Now I'm thinking it isn't a bug but just how we are stuck, with that grayed-out menu that can't set to other groups.

Well I suppose what you could do is make a group between your wife and yourself and a third account or so with an alt and then stagger the tier back and forth, maybe even make 2 groups and shuffle them back and forth. But it's not really an efficient solution. Better tools need to be developed for group land to facilitate group projects and business like rentals and ticket sales.

BTW, people always think of new and better ways to grief. Having a group to set to is not fool-proof unless you move to manual invitations, which is time consuming and loses you business. I have come across people who have deliberately joined the open-enrollment rentals group and set their prim-heavy sky boxes to group right above a legitimate tenant struggling to keep a prim count down. Totally annoying. There is no way to ban a person from a group once they misbehave, you can only ban them from land, but try doing that over lots of little 512 parcels.

you can periodically transfer the land to the merchant group to return offending prims and then return it to the land holding group for regular operations.

That sounds like a great tip if all the land is in one piece but it means having to go through piece by piece to sell parcels if they are divided and it seems to open up an avenue for mistakes, especially of the "sell for 0 variety" and warning notices that "your group has too much land" or whatever. I don't know if it is an efficient method.

In my red dragon vilages for landless i just leave it as it is. To be honest I didnt even know thet they got dwell as group member if the land was set to group, i thought it would have to be group owned land for that.

Now i know, its fine with me, let them keep it, the houses are free and I gave furniture and grants of L$ to the first founding tenants so a little dwell wont hurt much

I wonder if there is a market for Apartment Barons...