Renting out mainland

[Sweet2770]

Hey, Im tying to figure out how to rent out via the caperlet rental system.

Is anyone familiar with it and maybe could help?

Do i just need to put the rental meter on the land and then make the land for sale?? or is there another way we should do it

hope someone can help how to set it up so i dont do something wrong.. I have been searching youtube for info but I cant find some well explained videos of how to do it

[Qie Niangao]

I don't know Casperlet, but I can say you'll definitely never want to set Mainland for sale if your objective is to rent it out. That's an Estate thing only.

(Let's hope somebody will be by to explain Casperlet. I took one look at the FAQ and decided that's best left to somebody who knows what they're talking about.)

[Sweet2770]

Thanks for answer Qie. Well im just new in all this renting out and didnt want to do something taht is wrong or not allowed

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

You'll want to restrict rezzing to a group (or watch for squatters), then just make sure the tenant pays the rental box and joins the group.

The group could be invite-only, if you want to really keep squatters from placing their own stuff down. A bot could be automated to invite new tenants to the group when they pay, or you'll have to invite them yourself.

I dunno about CasperLet either  but the general idea is simple. You should own the land on Mainland, always. If you sell it, you can't reclaim it like Private Sim owners can.

[Sweet2770]

Okay.

The thing is if i put a rental meter on my mainland and tenant pays for like a week and stops pay after that week.. will the tenant still be able to "live" on the land or can I kick them out?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

14 minutes ago, Sweet2770 said:

Okay.

The thing is if i put a rental meter on my mainland and tenant pays for like a week and stops pay after that week.. will the tenant still be able to "live" on the land or can I kick them out?

Yep, since you own the land and the group, you can return their stuff and kick them from the group.

[Sweet2770]

Okay i think i got it

Can I set the land so that the group is the owner? Cus right now im the person who owns it and havent created a group yet.. Didnt knew I had to

[Wulfie Reanimator]

8 minutes ago, Sweet2770 said:

Okay i think i got it

Can I set the land so that the group is the owner? Cus right now im the person who owns it and havent created a group yet.. Didnt knew I had to

You don't have to create the group unless you want to make it harder for someone to squat on the land without your permission.

You can totally leave rezzing available to everyone and just check the land every now and then.

One benefit might be that the tenant won't need to contact you to get into the group after paying.

(I don't remember how group-owned land works.)

Edited October 26, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Sweet2770]

Ah okay, well it seems straight forward when knowing everything

Thanks alot for taking time to answer, I really appreciate it

[Qie Niangao]

I'm sure Prokofy or somebody has a handbook of how to do Mainland rentals. There's quite a variety of options so "doing it wrong" is (mostly) just doing it right for a different situation.

Much of Mainland is group-owned because of the 10% tier bonus (so the Premium entry-level 1024, for example, gives 1126 of tier). There are other advantages like being able to define different group "roles" with different permissions for what they can do on the land.

I think you've already decided that each rental will be its own parcel. (That's typical, but obviously that doesn't work when the rentals are stacked vertically.) For a modest operation with just a few tenants it can be liberating to make each rental use a separate group for its parcel. That means tenants will be automatically constrained to the land impact of the parcel where they can rez, they can be granted a lot of land permissions applicable only to their rented parcel, and they can't go around returning any other tenant's stuff. That group-per-rental approach doesn't scale-up very far, though, because the account that pays the tier must belong to each rental group.

[Sweet2770]

It would be nice to get a copy of the handbook  

And again im so new on all this that i didnt even knew by having the group as owner youll get 10% tier. For now I only own a 1024 land that I want to try rent out and go from there.. We have to start somewhere

Is Prokofy someone that is able to reach out to in world?

[Qie Niangao]

I may have conflated two very different people, @Prokofy Neva (who is a long-time Mainland landlord) and @Lindal Kidd (who I think used to teach a land ownership course at Builder's Brewery, maybe?). I know Prokofy has posted here recently, and Lindal recently stepped away from SL but maybe her course materials survive somewhere, I don't know.

Meanwhile, the Knowledge Base has a kind of basic primer on "Renting land to others" that may be informative.

[Sweet2770]

thank you so much  Appreciate your help

[Teresa Firelight]

sweet, if you have purchased casperlet, they have a support group where you can ask questions. If you did not get an invite to that group with purchase, IM casperhelp (uri secondlife:///app/agent/828f7198-42e5-41b4-bd60-926a33ea067b/about) and ask for an invite to teh group. They also have a manual for new users at:  https://wiki.casperdns.com/index.php/CasperLet/Quick_Start

[Sweet2770]

oh okay, ill contact them and thx

[Lindal Kidd]

Hi @Sweet2770! As Qie says, I've stepped away from SL, but that doesn't mean I am TOTALLY gone! I did teach a class about land, but 1) it's out of date, and 2) it was aimed at the land owner/renter, not the landlord who's renting out parcels. However, I did use the Casperlet rental system with my own Mainland rental properties. Here are a few tips.

• If it's Mainland, don't set the land for sale! If you own a private estate region (that is, you own the whole region, and pay LL your monthly land fee, and it says "Estate" in About Land/Type), you can set parcels for sale. For the rest of this response, I'm going to assume you have Mainland. (If, instead, you have a Private Estate, contact Rolig Loon, often found here in the Forums. She is experienced with the ins and outs of private estate rentals).
• Create a group, say, "Home Sweet Home". Make yourself the owner. Create an alt account, if you haven't got one already, and make her an owner, too. Never put anyone except yourself or your alt in the Owner role. Rename the "Member" role "Tenant". Make sure that this role does not have the "pay group liabilities and receive group dividends" ability active.
• With your group tag active. set the land to your group, and then deed it to the group as well. Check the "owner makes contribution with deed" checkbox. This will transfer the land to group ownership and insure you are also donating enough tier to the group to pay the monthly fees.
• Set your land to show in search. This will incur a small weekly fee ($L30, if I recall).
• Create a Place Page for your rentals. https://places.secondlife.com/
• Set your land to allow only group members to rez objects.
• In your personal Profile, create a Classified ad for your rentals. You can pay whatever you like for this ad above the required minimum. People who pay more for their ads have them ranked higher in Search results. But you'd have to pay enormous amounts to get a top ranking. Just pay a little more than the minimum, to differentiate yourself from the bottom feeders.
• Create an ad for your properties by making a Marketplace store and listing a handout (that you will create) as a free item. List it under Real Estate\Mainland.
• Create another ad by making a post about your rentals in https://community.secondlife.com/forums/forum/286-mainland/  Edit this often, to keep it bumped up near the top of the forum.
• Put a Pick in your Profile, and/or a blurb about your rentals in your "about me" section.
• Subdivide your land into your rental parcels.
• Create your Casperlet account online.
• Set out your rental box server somewhere. Populate it with your parcel descriptions, promotional flyers, rules and regulations, landmarks...whatever you want your tenants to have when they rent a place from you.
• Set out your rental boxes. You can configure these on the website. They have lots of options about setting rental amounts, frequency, what notifications you will get, prim counting, what happens when a tenant stops paying, etc etc. The notecards that come with the system, the website, and the help group will help answer your questions on all this stuff.
• Unless it's changed, Casper does not have an automatic group inviter function. You will want your renters to be members of your Home Sweet Home group, so they can rez their stuff. You can simply respond quickly to notices that you have a new renter, and send them a group invite. Or you can create an account with SmartBots and put a bot on your land to automatically send a group invite to new renters. This does require an ongoing subscription. You'll have to decide whether it is worth it to you to offer this convenience to your tenants.

Note that your rentals can be individual parcels (the most common arrangement), but they can also be skyboxes or apartment units that share a common land parcel. In the latter case, you won't simply use the physical size of the land to determine how many objects a tenant can have out. Instead, you'll set a land impact allowance for each tenant, and use a prim counter (the built in one in Casperlet works well) so you and your tenants can keep track of their stuff. You'll have to do some policing of tenants who have a tendency to exceed their allowances.

Good luck with your adventure in Land Baronessing! If you have further questions, send me a PM in the forums here, or let me know when you'll be in world and we can meet up.

Edited October 26, 2023 by Lindal Kidd

[Sweet2770]

omg thank you so much for taking time to text it out like this Lindal.

I defently got more wiser now.

and im actually in world most of the day everyday so i might contact you whenever I have questions (Im sure i have alot more to ask about)

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'm sure Prokofy or somebody has a handbook of how to do Mainland rentals. There's quite a variety of options so "doing it wrong" is (mostly) just doing it right for a different situation.

Much of Mainland is group-owned because of the 10% tier bonus (so the Premium entry-level 1024, for example, gives 1126 of tier). There are other advantages like being able to define different group "roles" with different permissions for what they can do on the land.

I think you've already decided that each rental will be its own parcel. (That's typical, but obviously that doesn't work when the rentals are stacked vertically.) For a modest operation with just a few tenants it can be liberating to make each rental use a separate group for its parcel. That means tenants will be automatically constrained to the land impact of the parcel where they can rez, they can be granted a lot of land permissions applicable only to their rented parcel, and they can't go around returning any other tenant's stuff. That group-per-rental approach doesn't scale-up very far, though, because the account that pays the tier must belong to each rental group.

I'm afraid I don't have a handbook and I need to update my blogs with helpful hints. 

Groups cost $100 to make, no? I would avoid making a lot of groups, although some agents like Timo give tenants their own group that he makes or puts tier in their group. I don't believe in vertical stacks at all. With grouped land, you can put the prims anywhere so you can make a parcel even 256 m2 that will fit a skybox and add a prim allotment to it -- which is only done in writing on the rental lease, so you have to watch that the tenant doesn't go over. Most people don't.

[Lindal Kidd]

5 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm afraid I don't have a handbook and I need to update my blogs with helpful hints. 

Groups cost $100 to make, no? I would avoid making a lot of groups, although some agents like Timo give tenants their own group that he makes or puts tier in their group. I don't believe in vertical stacks at all. With grouped land, you can put the prims anywhere so you can make a parcel even 256 m2 that will fit a skybox and add a prim allotment to it -- which is only done in writing on the rental lease, so you have to watch that the tenant doesn't go over. Most people don't.

Prok makes a good point here. The big problem with "stacked" skyboxes, or any arrangement that puts rental units on a common land parcel, is that all the tenants share the one music and one media setting. You can wind up with one tenant that loves classical music and another who loves heavy metal "fighting over the remote" and switching things back and forth. A separate parcel for each tenant avoids this. (I did have parcels that were shared by up to five tenants, and no one ever came to me with any problems, but it's still a potential drawback.)

[Prokofy Neva]

37 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Hi @Sweet2770! As Qie says, I've stepped away from SL, but that doesn't mean I am TOTALLY gone! I did teach a class about land, but 1) it's out of date, and 2) it was aimed at the land owner/renter, not the landlord who's renting out parcels. However, I did use the Casperlet rental system with my own Mainland rental properties. Here are a few tips.

• If it's Mainland, don't set the land for sale! If you own a private estate region (that is, you own the whole region, and pay LL your monthly land fee, and it says "Estate" in About Land/Type), you can set parcels for sale. For the rest of this response, I'm going to assume you have Mainland. (If, instead, you have a Private Estate, contact Rolig Loon, often found here in the Forums. She is experienced with the ins and outs of private estate rentals).
• Create a group, say, "Home Sweet Home". Make yourself the owner. Create an alt account, if you haven't got one already, and make her an owner, too. Never put anyone except yourself or your alt in the Owner role. Rename the "Member" role "Tenant". Make sure that this role does not have the "pay group liabilities and receive group dividends" ability active.
• With your group tag active. set the land to your group, and then deed it to the group as well. Check the "owner makes contribution with deed" checkbox. This will transfer the land to group ownership and insure you are also donating enough tier to the group to pay the monthly fees.
• Set your land to show in search. This will incur a small weekly fee ($L30, if I recall).
• Create a Place Page for your rentals. https://places.secondlife.com/
• Set your land to allow only group members to rez objects.
• In your personal Profile, create a Classified ad for your rentals. You can pay whatever you like for this ad above the required minimum. People who pay more for their ads have them ranked higher in Search results. But you'd have to pay enormous amounts to get a top ranking. Just pay a little more than the minimum, to differentiate yourself from the bottom feeders.
• Create an ad for your properties by making a Marketplace store and listing a handout (that you will create) as a free item. List it under Real Estate\Mainland.
• Create another ad by making a post about your rentals in https://community.secondlife.com/forums/forum/286-mainland/  Edit this often, to keep it bumped up near the top of the forum.
• Put a Pick in your Profile, and/or a blurb about your rentals in your "about me" section.
• Subdivide your land into your rental parcels.
• Create your Casperlet account online.
• Set out your rental box server somewhere. Populate it with your parcel descriptions, promotional flyers, rules and regulations, landmarks...whatever you want your tenants to have when they rent a place from you.
• Set out your rental boxes. You can configure these on the website. They have lots of options about setting rental amounts, frequency, what notifications you will get, prim counting, what happens when a tenant stops paying, etc etc. The notecards that come with the system, the website, and the help group will help answer your questions on all this stuff.
• Unless it's changed, Casper does not have an automatic group inviter function. You will want your renters to be members of your Home Sweet Home group, so they can rez their stuff. You can simply respond quickly to notices that you have a new renter, and send them a group invite. Or you can create an account with SmartBots and put a bot on your land to automatically send a group invite to new renters. This does require an ongoing subscription. You'll have to decide whether it is worth it to you to offer this convenience to your tenants.

Note that your rentals can be individual parcels (the most common arrangement), but they can also be skyboxes or apartment units that share a common land parcel. In the latter case, you won't simply use the physical size of the land to determine how many objects a tenant can have out. Instead, you'll set a land impact allowance for each tenant, and use a prim counter (the built in one in Casperlet works well) so you and your tenants can keep track of their stuff. You'll have to do some policing of tenants who have a tendency to exceed their allowances.

Good luck with your adventure in Land Baronessing! If you have further questions, send me a PM in the forums here, or let me know when you'll be in world and we can meet up.

This is all good advice, especially when starting out to avoid complexities. But I do have some differences of philosophy.

1. I don't use Casper or any other commercial script because then I am dependent on them, they harvest my business information, and while rare, Casper and others do go down. Casper is pretty much the monopolist. I prefer an open-source script developed from the script Hank Ramos open-sourced some 17 years ago or whatever, which has been modified a dozen times by other scripters either voluntarily, or when I hired them. So you can get that at my store in Ross for free normally, but I've been reorganizing, can't log on now, and it will have to wait until next week. This script enables you to REFUND -- something a lot of scripts don't permit (or landlords don't choose that option). I think REFUNDS for a small cancellation fee are VITAL.

2. The account that is the owner of the rental boxes (only your alt is safe) and receives the cash rent should be DIFFERENT than the account holding the tier. That's as an emergency backup, in case your account is put on hold for late tier payment to LL, or hacked, or you can't get it logged on for some reason. That way, the account receiving the cash from the boxes -- generally only a premium account donating 1024 to a group -- can pay the tier by cashing out the Lindens to PayPal. It's more expensive than paying just from the web page (after converting to dollars, but not cashing out) -- but again, it's an emergency back-up. Make sure your alts all have clear markings that they are agents of your company. Note: if an alt account only has the capacity to donate 1024, it can't move more tier than that out of a group. The workaround is to "buy from group" with "contribute when deeding". 

3. Include the price and prim description and any features on the land description and a lease card in the box.

4. Search/Places ads for 30L a week are nearly worthless now for the regular viewer, and somewhat helpful on Firefox, but not worth putting a lot of time and money into because search works poorly. Put up ads on the forums, in various clubs and furniture stores, etc. 

5. I believe in keeping land settings open so that people can invite their friends over and they can rez things and show each others things they've purchased, etc. I have three levels in the group -- tenants, residents, officers. So anyone can join on demand and start decorating immediately without waiting for a landlord to log in. I don't believe in having a group inviter bot taking up an avatar slot on the sim. Use the group joiners that require three clicks in chat to join if you feel people can't figure out how to use search/groups. Most people use the group joiners. Then after you see they have paid on My Accounts, you add them to "resident" role which enables them to change the settings on the land -- they can put group-only build, object entry, and scripts if they like -- and they give them the assortment of rights you want, such as set landing, ban, invite others, etc. Only officers can buy and sell land and deeded objects and return group-set prims.

6. Make sure to turn off "avatars can see me". Most people want it off for privacy.

7. I view Classified ads as only marginally useful -- worth doing now and then but they mainly get loss under the very big spenders who can splash out tens of thousands of Lindens per week for ads. It's worth doing a cheap one for your main office, and then occasional ones of $1000 or $500 to feature some special or new location. Most rentals come from search/places as it happens; then classifieds; then store ads; then word-of-mouth; then picks. I survey each tenant to ask how they found the rental. If they refund, I always ask them if they had any problems.

8. "Owner makes contribute with deed" often glitches up and it seems like it wants you first to put the tier in, even if "contribute with deed" is suppose to accomplish this. So "buy for group" any land that you yourself bought as an individual or took from the auction is a faster way, but first you have to put tier in the group, which you may not have. This is a constant annoyance I find. 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

8 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Prok makes a good point here. The big problem with "stacked" skyboxes, or any arrangement that puts rental units on a common land parcel, is that all the tenants share the one music and one media setting. You can wind up with one tenant that loves classical music and another who loves heavy metal "fighting over the remote" and switching things back and forth. A separate parcel for each tenant avoids this. (I did have parcels that were shared by up to five tenants, and no one ever came to me with any problems, but it's still a potential drawback.)

The big dome stackers put all the tenants on the same top 40 station, and they don't hand out the right to change media settings, to prevent that sort of problem. People use those web-based radios or open up a shoutcast stream on their web and listen while playing SL. 

If your land is grouped, you need to deed any media or YouTube player to the group. You have to shut off the ability to move or sell group-deeded objects, or they are griefed by being shot up in the sky where you can't find them, or stolen if on transfer. So you then have to pick up and buy the item and return it to the tenant when they leave. 

[Qie Niangao]

12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The big dome stackers put all the tenants on the same top 40 station, and they don't hand out the right to change media settings, to prevent that sort of problem. People use those web-based radios or open up a shoutcast stream on their web and listen while playing SL. 

I think the common "web-based radios" use what's often called "Media on a Prim" (MoaP, which the Lab introduced as "shared media"). They behave quite differently from parcel audio and parcel media, but they work well enough and are fairly easy for tenants to understand—and they can bring their own from rental to rental without needing any particular land permissions.

Tangent of mostly historical interest: Way back when, before MoaP existed, there was another way to have more than one stream on a single parcel. For both audio and media, it used parcel media (so needed to be owned by the parcel owner, not the tenant) but it didn't actually set the media stream on the parcel. Rather if set it independently for individual avatars ("agents") on the parcel, using PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT. For example, I made a script to separately manage streams on each level of a simple space station I was selling back when Zindra was brand new. It worked fine and still does, so if you see modern stacked rentals doing that you'll know it's merely the magick of the ancients. (But you probably won't see it. For one thing, that function was how RedZone associated SL usernames with IP addresses, and anyway MoaP is much simpler.)

[Sweet2770]

hi Prokofy.

Thanks for taking time to tell all this, and also to everyone who responded on this posts. 

when you are able to log in, then I would love to have the script instead of using the casperlet... I apprecaite everyones words and will sit down and take one step at the time... so many informations already  

[Sweet2770]

Is there a reason why we create a group and make our alt owner too???

[Rowan Amore]

46 minutes ago, Sweet2770 said:

Is there a reason why we create a group and make our alt owner too???

You need 2 people for a group to remain active.  The best way to achieve that is to have an alt as owner as well as yourself.