What do you do when a landlord (mall) shuts down and refuses to honor prepaid rent?

This may be the wrong forum, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty new and this situation has happened and I'm not sure what my recourse is, if any.

I rented a space in a mall for 4 weeks. After two weeks the mall owner and manager had some kind of dispute and the owner shut the whole thing down. I asked the owner for my un-used prepaid rent (2 weeks worth) and he directed me to the manager. Who directed me back to the owner. Etc.

The manager's first response actually was: well, the rental agreement says no refunds. To which I responded, yes, true, IF I BREAK THE AGREEMENT, such a statement by you in any agreement is not applicable if YOU break the agreement and shut down. He then directed me again back to the owner.

So, I think I know I'm screwed out of 2 weeks prepaid rent, and I'll chalk it up to experience, but is there any kind of recourse? It doesn't seem like an appropriate situation for an abuse report. It's just bad and unscrupulous business, which in the real world would land us all in court.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice.

-Taylor

Happens all the time -

About 1 in 3 actually refund your money. Most have already lost tons of money on their mall and couldnt pay you if they wanted to. I suppose some malls are scams? I hadnt really thought about it.

My guess is you are .. Out of Luck.

I stopped worrying about malls when I realized 90% ++ of all my business was at my main store.

Its easier to TP sometimes than walk through a laggy sim anyhow.

I'm sorry to hear you lost out there, Taylor. But the chances of any refund or recourse are very low. I hope you didn't lose much. Best to chalk it up to experience and be a bit more careful with your choice of locations in future.

Thanks, I figured I was out the money, and really it wasn't much, so it's a cheap lesson.

And I think you're right about forgetting malls. I do make 90% of the money out of the main store.

You suck it up and don't do the mistake twice.

Whay can you do? Write it off as a bad experience, walk away, and find a better landlord.

I've lost more merchant spaces than I can readily count because the mall closed, the sim got sold, the sim got reformatted, or a host of other reasons. In only one of those cases was I ever given any sort of refund or credit for my pre-paid time.

The lesson to be learned from this is don't pre-pay more in rent than you are willing to write off. That goes for land rentals as well as for merchant space. Conditions in SL change daily. Sometimes the person you are renting from has control over the matter, and sometines they are just as much a victim of change as you are.

When I pre-pay for merchant space, I consider that money completely spent, right then. Hopefully I get my full value for it. if not? Well, in RL dollars, it's not usually a lot of money.

Whether malls are profitable depends a LOT on what you sell and how you sell it.

I have 3 mall locations and a store. The mall locations are covering their overhead and making profits. But I'm probably closing the store at the end of March, because it isn't coming close to covering its overhead, even with good advertizing.

That is for my clothes and furniture. My textures are a different story. I sell them at a single huge store that I partner with, splitting profits with the store owner. The sales there make my other stores look like change found in the gutter.

Ick - I hate the "go see the other person" baloney.



I have the reverse issue - I'll have tenants that are partners get land in my sims.

We *all* know how long the typical Second Life partnership lasts.

Only thing I can do is make sure that I deal with only *one* of them financially, so I'm not ping-ponged in a domestic dispute, much like you were.

I'd say: go to a popular offsite forum and lay out what happened so most everyone knows, for starters.

So yeah, I guess this happens a lot, and I'm writing it off as a bad experience. And I will need to be more careful about who I can or can't trust. It's just hard to tell.

The extent of this particular scam is rather breathtaking to me though. The sim was "sponsered" and appeared to be owned by a legitimate RL website. The website was pretty slick too. But then, anyone can set up a website. And now, of course, the website is dark also. And when I look up the domain, it's registered to "John Smith" and a made up company name which also happens to own several hundred other similar websites out of a dubious sounding address in "Newark, DE".

Anyway, thanks for the comments. Lesson learned. I do consider rent money spent when I spend it. It's just the arrogance of the two residents involved that got me. That and the talk to the other guy BS.

The question you have to ask yoursself is, how much is your rent and how much is your time worth?

Let's play with little numbers.
Let's say you make US$20hr. in Real Life.
And let's say you paid L$540wk. for your space at the mall in Second Life.
How much time have you invested chasing your 2 weeks rent?

Let's do the exchange rate. At $540 a week, 2 weeks rent = US$4
Therefore if you spend 12 minutes of your time trying to recoup the money you only break even on your investment in time. Any more than 12 minutes spent is a huge waste of your time.

Don't bother- Walk away from it and move on (just remember never to do business with either of them again).

Post Script-
I don't know what your RL employment is and I don't know what your SL store was. If my numbers are way off, I'm just making up simple numbers to make a point.