What do you consider to be a reasonable markup on rental properties?

Incanus,

It's beautiful! If I didn't already have my own projects in the works, I would love to live there!

Do you find that most people need/want that many prims? If the house prims are excluded, that seems like an awful lot of prims for furnishings. Do they end up all getting used?

When you say that you price by the prim allowance, how did you determine the value of the prim? Is it based on your total prims (including common areas and houses), or just on the prims available to the renter? I'm assuming you used your monthly land fee as your financial starting point? Did you mark up at all from there?

Princess Ivory

My tale is a bit wonky.

We opened our east coast beach themed area (Flotsam Beach) with 2.5x prim limits compared to the mainland, and 3 dollars a prim, which we'd determined to be under the median and the average for the rentals we surveyed hat were doing well. We were using 3500 prims for our own projects, for prefab buildings (so they don't count against your limit), and for streets/plants. 1500 prims buffer so people can rez vehicles and to guard against lag. So that's 10,000 prims spreads across a bunch of lots, good price, great limits, how can it go wrong?

Barely anybody rented.

We got a lot of positive feedback about the design of the sim, but our prices were asking for L$450-1800 a week. Yes, you got a lot of prims for your money, but it SEEMED to be too rich for most people's blood.

This week we re-planned the lots, doubled up for some apartments and cut both prim limits and prices in half... hoping that'll kickstart the rentals. We'll see. I'm worried this just isn't going to work. We're providing a stable, grief-free community, buildings for free, lower prices than most, and yet no real uptake...

I have to wonder what we're doing wrong. Hopefully the 50% off will help...

That is one of the key points, as many of the Estate owners do provide the sort of service that those on the mainland wish they had from LL. I work now for Fair-Isles Estate, and whenever there is any problem of any kind the owner or one of his Estate Managers is right there, right away, to put matters right. Griefing has a very short lifespan on these sims; lost items are quickly recovered; sim restarts whenever anyone starts to notice any lag; dispute resolution; it is just great, and I love the work.

The owner, Rock Ryder, is a very friendly guy, and he has a great network of informal contacts with other Estate owners, maybe you would be better contacting him.

Vi

Thank you Princess... the esteem of one's peers is beyond treasure......

Funnily enough, most of our residents use nothing like their full prim allowance (although one did go over by 900..... loads of high prim furniture!) but it doesn't take much more than a bed, kitchen range, coffee table, dining table & chairs and whoops! prim limit approaching at speed..... We do keep a fair reserve "just in case" as well.

Yes, I used the monthly fee as the starting point, and basically worked back from there, as many others have shown in their calculations. But my own market research quickly showed that trying to cover ALL of the tier through renting would produce a final rent that was simply too much for the market. So we priced to be in the mid-range of current rental pricing. And I'm fortunate enough that I can fund the shortfall out of my own RL resources and not worry about it (too much! LOL). I didn't mark up for things like the cost of houses, landscaping... I just regarded those as sunk costs (although between us my partner and I had already accumulated about 10 different houses, castles, cottages, cardboard boxes etc which we were able to reuse!)

I must do a fly-by of your project, too!

Seven

I've noticed a slowdown in rental uptake too - it may well be an SL-wide rental slowdown, with the most recent intake of new SLers having now decided which way they're going to treat their SL existence and those that want to rent, rent.... we might have to wait for another surge in numbers, possibly?

Not sure about changing your strategy so quickly, unless you're sure you have things set up wrongly.... there are a lot of renting sims out there, so it DOES take time for a sim to fill up

Also, the attractiveness of renting has gone down a bit, now that there's an ample supply of new mainland sims being brought on line, compared to a few months ago. The price to purchase mainland parcels has come down significantly, over the past few months.

So, a softening of rental demand was pretty much expected.

Still, I think there's still benefit to renting mainland in a rental sim, if you want to avoid "bad neighbor" problems, especially when you factor in that there is no upfront purchase cost, and the monthly costs will likely be lower too.

There's a lot of new competition in the mainland rentals area now which might be affecting estate sales too. Pretty much every two bit land flipper is offering barren parcels for rent.

Seven,

I took a look at Flotsam Beach last night. First of all, let me say that I really like the shops with open fronts and awnings that open onto the beach front boardwalk! I think they very much give that East Coast/New Jersey/Coney Island kind of feel you are going for. And yes, it is nice to see ocean and beach that is something other than tropical (although the tropical is fun and beautiful). You are competing with the tropics - so keep that in mind. People want things to be attractive.

And I am interested to see how much interest you get for the small vendor tents on the wharf. They are cheap, but the prims are very low, not allowing for much at all, even when using a vendor system. And will they get enough sales to stay, or will you have a lot of turnover?

I think that the center of the island is too dense, and would benefit from less shops, and some open public park space. Someplace for people to get an ice cream cone and sit on a park bench, etc. Make it pretty and peaceful. The overall feeling of the sim when flying around, and looking down at it, is that it is packed pretty tightly with buildings.

Regarding the prefab rental units - it may be a turnoff to people that they are all identical in design, and just lined up in straight rows along the shore, without much space between them. I would shift those around a bit to shake up the mix, and provide for some more space. Maybe some single story units that are closer to the shore, and open right onto it. And I don't know if they are modifiable or not, but it would be great if instead of just a door on the side of the building, there were slider doors on the front that opened directly onto that beachfront deck they all have, and stairs led down the front to the beach.

Just some constructive feedback - take it with a grain of salt. I'm new to landlording, so I looked at it as a consumer/potential renter, and those were my impressions.

All in all, it's a good project. Keep tweaking it, and really focus on advertising, and getting the word out.

Good luck!
Princess Ivory

I posted another answer to Seven, in a different thread we all seem to also be participating in. Here it is: /327/b2/188928/1.html#post1540017

Let's all just decide to use one thread or the other, so all the info (which is great info!) stays together.

Which thread seems to contain the most info at this point?

Princess Ivory

I'll keep discussions about the brass tacks of keeping Flotsam Beach afloat in my own thread. Let's leave this one as a generalized discussion about the rental business and current trends.

I can understand the market shift since the new mainland opened, and since odds are the wave of folks coming in from the winter/spring mass media publicity is dying down. I guess it's just a lousy time to get into the market... but we're here, and we gotta make the best of it!

I've watched this discussion with interest, as I created Faeria Village in the first place and, with the help of Princess Ivory, am really enjoying the changes in the sim overall. It is indeed possible to take a horrible place on the mainland and turn it into something much more beautiful, and the support I have recieved has been quite encouraging.

I am not involved in the rentals of which Princess Ivory speaks, as I have a different goal here, but I wonder if anyone has tried just giving space to people and asking for donations? I know that this does not work well in my village, but it's not about the money for me, and I wonder if it has ever worked out for anyone, or if anyone even thinks that it could.

At the suggestion of Princess Ivory I recently began asking for a 5% commisssion on sales from my vendors as opposed to outright donations, and this seems to be working a bit, though it's only been a week since this started. I realize that I will never cover tier this way, and do not intend to - Desmond wisely stated a couple of months ago that if you were going to support struggling artists you had to be prepared to operate at a loss, and I have certainly found this to be true - but are there other ways people have found of generating some kind of support for projects like this without directly charging rent to vendors or tennants?

The best part though, as a couple of you have stated, is the feeling of community and family that has sprung up. Some things really are priceless...