Im Wanting to Make a Mall, So I Have Some Questions

Hi everyone!
I am thinking about making a mall, and possibly a casino in the same land. So i have a few questoins:

1) In a mall, what would a good price be to charge people to set up a shop in there per week?

2) If i upgrade to a Premium account and buy the 512 square meters that the premium comes with, plus another 512 square meters, would this be enough for a mall? The mall doesnt have to be insanely huge, it can be a bit smaller than normal if i have to.

3) Are there any prim limits on purchased land?

4) How much does land cost? I heard that for an extra 512 square meters, it costs $5 per month on top of the $75 per year for the premium account.

5) Is there any pictures anywhere that shows how big 512 square meters (or any other amount of meters) is or something, because i have no idea how much that would be?

6) What would be a good system of renting out shops? I need there to be some way where the person can only add objects in their store and some way to promt them each week to charge them or something.

Thank you for any help that i can get!

You really don't want second hand info., get your info from the horses mouth (SL website, your account, land)
Do your research then go out and make your millions!

1) In a mall, what would a good price be to charge people to set up a shop in there per week?

The going rate is L$50 per week for a mall space with 30 to 50 prims allowed.

2) If i upgrade to a Premium account and buy the 512 square meters that the premium comes with, plus another 512 square meters, would this be enough for a mall? The mall doesnt have to be insanely huge, it can be a bit smaller than normal if i have to.

Pardon me while I stop laughing. That is WAY too small for anything other than a specialized boutique! 512 M2 only gives you 117 prims. If you have a minimal building structure and allow each merchant 30 prims, you can get three merchants in that much space. Three. That's it! By the way, there is no First Land any more. You buy land at the market rate now, no more "first 512 M2 is just 512 L$!".

3) Are there any prim limits on purchased land?

117 prims per 512 M2, just like any land in SL.

4) How much does land cost? I heard that for an extra 512 square meters, it costs $5 per month on top of the $75 per year for the premium account.

That is JUST the maintenance fee! The cost per month to keep the land. Land is selling for L$7 to L$20 per M2, depending on locations. That is a purchase price in excess of the monthly fee.

5) Is there any pictures anywhere that shows how big 512 square meters (or any other amount of meters) is or something, because i have no idea how much that would be?

512 M2 a space 16 meters by 32 meters, or about 50 feet by 100 feet. Roughly the same size as an urban one-family city lot.

6) What would be a good system of renting out shops? I need there to be some way where the person can only add objects in their store and some way to promt them each week to charge them or something.

APEZ makes a good one. Shop around.

I will answer one part of your question:

1024 is NOT big enough for a mall. It's barely big enough for a single shop. Add to that the fact that you will be limited to a total of 234 prims on that land, and you might get the picture

Part of your research really should be doing a LOT of shopping in existing shops and malls to see how much room you need to move around. Then go to plots for sale and turn on the property lines to see how big the lots are. To do this go to the "view" menu and select "property lines".

I don't mean this as an insult at all, but the first poster was right. If you don't realize how small a 1024 lot is, you really need to spend a lot more time looking around in SL and researching before even considering this.

I would not consider a mall in something less than at least 5 times what you are thinking of, and that's going to cost a good bit of money. I would say at least a 4096 plot, and the LEAST I have seen those going for lately is 60,000l$. That's just to BUY the land.

I think you need to get a basic grasp of the game before your even think about setting up a mall or any other business. From your post, I get the impression that you don't really grasp prim allocation in relation to plot size. Each plot of land can only support a limited number of prims, 512sqm will get you 117 prims, 1024sqm will get you 234 prims and so on. You will need you use prims to build the mall in addition to allocating at least 30 prims to each of your tenants. This is going suck up the prims pretty fast and 234 prims on a 1024sqm isn't going to be enough. My advise is search around, firstly search the land sales tab for 512sqm plots of land. You can then teleport to an actual plot then right click the land to view the details. This will also give you a feel for the size of the land in relation to the size of your avatar. Check out a 1024sqm plot as well and you will see it's really not suitable. You should then search under 'places' and the 'classifieds' for malls and other related key words and then go out and research. Right click the land that the malls are placed to see how big the plot is, how many prims they have used etc. Check out how the stores are set up, how many prims each vendor gets and maybe even ask the owner some specific questions if they are approachable. This will also give you ideas about what you do and don't want to do.

Alright sorry for those absurd numbers

I have had second life for a while and am an amatuer scripter and everything, but have no experience with this kind of stuff but me and my friend are going to do this. Now Im willing to probably go to 8,192 square meters which is like $40 a month, right? Anyways, would this be suitable for a mall? How many shops do you think it could hold if i made the mall 3 stories? Would it allow enough prims per shop? Now is there a seperate fee to purchase that land aside the 40 a month? If i had a premium account, would i have to purchase 512 as well, even though it comes with the monthly fees paid for the land?

yeah, thats a pretty big plot and will give you more than enough prims. You could probably do it with a plot half the size. As well as paying your monthly tier fee you realise that you will need to purchase the land in the first place. Land nowadays can cost anywhere upwards of L$7 per sqm. Assuming you paid L$10 per sqm it will cost you L$81920 for 8192sqm which is in the region of about $300 USD.

I would also recommend visiting established and clearly successful malls. You can right-click on the ground and get parcel information. Depending on how the area is parceled out the information from this may not being very accurate but it should give you some idea.

Also, choosing a parcel on which to build is important. The cheapest land generally has some sort of drawback to it. Ugly neighboring builds, a confusing layout, surrounded by security barriers, etc. In a lot of, to put it bluntly, 'trashier' neighborhoods a mall owner needs to keep in mind his/her mall could be the target of griefers. I've gone to many small malls in sims like this to find them full of griefing objects and/or "How to make money on SL" pyramids. Also, many shoppers avoid such areas when there are nicer looking malls available with much the same products.

That said, it's often better to invest a little more money into property located on a sim where the neighbors have aesthetic tastes similar to yours.

I hate malls...........most don't have directories to find what you are looking for. If I was going the try to develop a place to shop, I would keep it relatively small in size with vendors to shop with. Yeah I know.......pretty drab but I hate TPing to a place listed in search and finding myself in the middle of some huge, fantastic looking building or group of buildings and having no idea where I need to go to find what I wanted.

But you need lots of prims for people to set up shop so 1024 is way small........2048 might be a start, but if successful that would be outgrown quickly. You don't have to have buildings for shops. Vendors spread out in an orderly fashion with some landscaping or paths is simple and, to me, appealing. Cute "booths" for the vending machines is always nice too.

Good to see you are taking all of the advice to heart, OP!

One thing about buying land I forgot to mention - if at all possible, look for land during high load times (times when lots of people are here, when the "online now" amount on the login screen are at least, say, 25000). Go to the land, then make sure you have your mini-map showing.

Big thing here - look for large masses of green dots in the same sim (the area colored the same as the one you are in.) Those green dots are people, and a lot of them means you have a high-traffic business there, probably a club or casino. If you see this - DON'T BUY THAT LAND!

Sims can only support a certain number of people, and if there are too many there you will get a lot of lag, or even not be able to get to your land. Lots of people have bought land at good prices to find it unusable for this reason.

My RL daughter had this happen (giving away my age here, lol. She's 26.) - She found a cheap plot, bought it quickly, and it's pretty much useless most of the time because of a casino right next door. If I had been there when she bought it she would not have wasted her money. Luckily, she had enough money to buy the plot next door, in a different sim. That hard to use plot is now her temple, only used during low-load times.

Of course, you can buy a great, low-lag plot today and a casino could be next door tomorrow, but at least you wouldn't start out with problems right away.

Good luck on your mall endeavors!