By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
So this is a six-part series. Or maybe it's a three-part series. Or maybe I won't get through this post, let's see.
Evil landlord taking away your prims.
In our first episode, we dealt with the chief awfulness of Mainland -- annoying and even nasty neighbours. Those particular nuisances at least have nice builds, more or less, and don't blight the skyline, put up giant glowing spires like the Siths or stick out a black-box club like they're in Snowcrash which you can't de-render because they put a zillion things in and around it that keep changing.
Why Panopticon
This series used to be called "Rental Dementia," but nowadays, as the population in Europe and the United States gets older, more and more people have to deal with dementia and they find this an insulting term when used casually. My uncle just died with early-onset dementia at the age of 76; my mother-in-law doesn't recognize me any more due to dementia; my aunt has the early stages of it; one of my oldest friend's mother has it and drives him crazy and I listen to him repeat information 100 times on the phone when he's here. And so on. I get it about dementia, truly I do.
But I decided to use "Panopticon" now to go beyond the "madness" that "Panopticon" can connote (Russians even cry panoptika! when something is particularly weird and funny) to its display powers. Read up on what the Panopticon is if you don't know.
That doesn't mean I spy on my tenants, which forums bullies always imply. Trust me, I have no inclination to spy on my tenants. I don't have the time or the interest, and PS if I burst in on my tenants, or cammed in on them, I wouldn't have tenants as they mainly use Firestorm, which has a feature that lets them know when someone is camming in on them. I find that creepy, and even forced to use Firestorm as I am now (more on that debacle later), I've never found and used that creepy cam-reveal feature because I don't care. Of course it's humorous that people dress up to the nines (or dress with very little left to the imagination) and go out to shopping events and clubs, then get mad that someone is staring at them lol.
I don't even look at my tenants' profiles, and really, I should try to do that more, they might serve as an earling warning system. Sometimes when the tenants are missing and haven't paid their rent I might look, or when they do something awful -- then I'm surprised to discover that they are male when I thought they were female, or female when I thought they were male, or both, or neither, or a vampire, or something. (Vampires seem to be back; or maybe they never left.)
But when I tenant has been with me years and years, generally I get to know them, the patterns of their behaviour, whether they are always on time and in full or always late with increasingly fabricated excuses, whether they overprim or watch their prims -- the basics.
So along comes a situation that doesn't end well for anyone really, but it happens and it's just how it is.
No Automated Removal Systems
I do not use automated systems that remove people's prims the minute their rent expires or after some engineered grace period. There are such systems in use; I'm not sure if there is a "return prims upon non-payment event" LSL command but it may merely function as an alert system that has the CSR then go and return the prims manually, or perhaps bots can do this now, I'm not sure.
I think that's insane because you only lose tenants when you return prims abruptly. I also don't use web-based systems because I see no reason why my business information needs to be handed over to third parties for them to exploit as they will. I don't want to fuss with all these trappings for a small business that can have accounts on a simple Excel spread sheet or notecard.
I most certainly don't use Casper, never did, and was a very early -- and punished -- critic of Casper -- whom hordes of people have now finally come around to loathing after this scandal (which has died down, with Casper still in place along with all the other dramatis personae).
Casper's rent-o-matic is laggier than the open-source rental script I use. I know this because I have tested them repeatedly. How can I do that if I have never bought Casper's products? By renting various stores or homes myself which have the vendors in use, and using a script radar to see how much script time they take up. Perhaps Casper has features that people appreciate -- certainly despite everything it is in wide use for vendors for shops -- I think mainly for their ability to resend merchandise -- but I'm not sure how much they are used as rental boxes. Probably a lot. But here's the thing:
They do not refund and do not let you pay ahead more than a month.
NO REFUNDS AND NO PAYMENTS AHEAD
Could I repeat that for the hard-of-hearing in the back? THEY DO NOT REFUND AND DO NOT LET YOU PAY AHEAD MORE THAN A MONTH.
That is, maybe they do? You tell me. But not a single person I have ever rented from has ever used those features, and keeps them set at NO REFUND and NO PAY AHEAD. This is extremely annoying because the notices to pay come out EARLY and when you go to pay, you can't pay a month because you're still got some part of a week left. You can end your rental and send a notice -- you don't get anything back if you do that. That's how MOST landlords work.
RAVENGLASS REFUNDS AND LETS YOU PAY AHEAD
Not me. I provide refunds and I provide the ability to pay ahead -- and more on those vexations in the next posts. I'm a big critic of the cultist open-source movement, the Richard Stallman and Tor types who abound in SL. But I use Hank Ramos' "liberated" script (because he got angry at all the competition cutting into his rent-seeking rental box business) because I can have people adapt and fix it. More than a dozen have, some paid, some unpaid. It's available for free at my shop, which is a boon to people new to the business.
On my rental boxes, you can a) click REFUND and for a small early cancellation fee get back what remains; b) pay ahead if you are worried your rental will be taken beyond the 4 weeks that gives you 10% discount. More people avail themselves to a) than b), but more on that in the next episode.
Notifications and GRACE PERIOD
Each rental box sends out multiple messages over 4 days telling you that your rent is due. The "my messages cap" excuse simply can't apply because at least one of them is bound to get through. I often go and send manual messages to chronic late payers because I'm sick of them stiffing me. Most people get the reminder or they are organized and have a day they know to pay their rent each month as in real life. After the box expires, it is in a GRACE PERIOD with a KEEP CALM sign with a "red" state. During that grace period of two days, no one else but you can pay it.
The purpose of the grace period is not to have people always take advantage of it and get 30 days instead of the 28 day week prescribed by the rental script. Some do, some don't. But it's there should they need it.
A Sad Story
So now let us come to a tenant who need not be named because she hasn't done anything wrong, although no doubt she feels victimized and feels that evil landlords have prevailed once again. These posts of mine are dedicated to illustrating how the "evil landlord" trope doesn't always apply in SL, but has applied enough to give the job a bad name, as in RL.
Most people are decent; most people pay their rent; most people don't grief. But the few who aren't like that will be blogged, sometimes named, simple because we have no other recourse to enforce civility in SL. No amount of threads, weird, crazy, insane messages harassing me for years will get me to cease the publication of bad behaviour or the explanation of situations that illustrate that the problem is not on my side.
So this tenant always pretty much paid on time -- more or less. But sometimes was late. She had a rental that was cheaper than all the other rentals on the sim -- 0.65/prim which was the old cost of my camp sites (many of which were removed due to abuse by alts on "two per person" limits, or creepy child avatars or day tripping harassers/griefers). The other campsites were either abandoned, sold, or turned into the higher cost and larger rentals of 0.75 or even 0.85 depending on whether they were roadside, waterfront etc.
When I raised the prices a few years ago when the Lindens thrust state tax on us (which cost me as much as an entire private island sim tier per month -- but with no island to rent out to show for it), I got rid of some of those low cost "camp sites" but that particular one happened to get "grandfathered" simply because that person was in it for four or five years or more. Sometimes it's too much bother to refund, reset scripts, roust out the person and listen to their complaints (over a....5L or 10L increase), etc. Thus it was left.
Takeover Policy
Unexpectedly, a person I hadn't had rent from me before IM'd me and asked to have the tenant's prims removed from a site he just rented. I hastened to the sim and saw to my chagrin that it was that long-time tenant who had been there for years. Normally when I see that someone's box has expired unattended past the two days or even a week, I IM them and see what the issue is. Maybe they've moved on or have COVID or whatever. It's not always possible to do these things in a timely manner, especially with my own increasing RL challenges. But it's standard as anyone who has rented from me knows. I didn't this time -- and someone pounced seeing the cheap rent.
Because of my generosity and leniency in this regard, people thus can get by with not paying for weeks on end -- but if they have been there for years, they know I won't return their prims. Because they will pay me the back rent when they show up -- most of the time. Lately, we've been enforcing that way more because certain people are deadbeats and made good on threats to return prims of even people who have been there for years if they chronically deadbeat me. (With 25L rentals I go and instantly return prims, which is explained in the lease; with a 2500L rental, I might let it age a bit longer).
But there's an exception to my tendency to err on the side of contacting people and going beyond the grace period of two days.
And that is our written and widely promulgated policy that if your grace period expires, then anyone who comes along willing to pay it at that point can pay the box and then ask to have your prims removed. If you were there for 10 years before that and now have COVID in the hospital, that's sad, but time and tide and tier wait for no man, and we have to pay the Lindens tier to maintain your rental. I've been in the hospital a lot this past year myself. Everybody has a story. Your story is sad, but so is my tier bill and I cannot subsidize your SL.
Trying to be Nice
Even so, I do check things in a situation before the new tenant starts building, and sometimes I will stop and refund them if I see, for example, that in fact they paid on time, but a Linden sim re-set caused the rental box to reset in time as if unpaid. This is actually very rare, but it does happen. Or I see if in fact a message was sent to me in IMs or email that somehow I missed.
In THIS case, the first thing I noticed was that the person had logged on the previous day -- that you can see in the group. So there was no reason for them not to pay their expired rental box which they could easily see at their home, even if "their messages capped" (a problem I don't believe in, because accounts tied to email enable IMs to go into email to be read there.) When I see a recent log-on like that, my sympathy dwindles.
Yet I still sat down and read all the past payments. And now I'm coming to the point of this story. You can only see payments going back 3 months, so that means April. I saw 9 payments were made from April 4, sometimes for one week, sometimes for two weeks, which was X amount of days according to the rent amount, which would take you to...23 days unpaid, in fact on the day it was taken over.
Now, if this person routinely made use of the grace period, that would be 9 x 2, and now we have 18 days accounted for, and only 5 days unpaid -- and we can't be sure they were 5 consecutive days.
Even so, it gives one pause, eh? A grandfathered cheaper rental. A grace period constantly exploited essentially leading to 18 unpaid days across 3 months at the very lease. This person happened to pay only one week at a time, instead of paying ahead 4 weeks and getting the 10% discount.
Every time I become aware of how untenable low-priced rentals are -- sometimes kept at, or moved to a low price because otherwise they won't rent -- I remember the words of this retired man in SL who ran a rentals business, who used to work at Lockheed. He used to run a loan company and gave reasonably-priced loans to buy land, and I once took a loan to buy land that was at risk of ruination next to my existing rentals (an age-old story). (Such loan companies and "banks" and "stock markets" later became illegal in SL. He is long gone from SL because rentals proved so time-consuming and unrewarding.)
When he took a look at my newbie communities for less-than-tier prices, he said simply:
"You've got to get out of those."
You've got to get out of those.
And so I did, as newbies communities or cheap camp sites have been closed, sold, or abandoned in Obscure, Patagonia, Tuliptree, Cayuga, Grace,
SOME RENT DOES NOT COVER TIER
With the rent she was paying, had she paid the 4 weeks with a discount, at that low "camp site" rate, her rent would not cover the tier for that parcel.
That's not her fault; it's my fault. I'm heedless of the scorn heaped on me by "big guy" landlords strutting around the forums and ridiculing me because I believe in having humane rentals. But you can see in a situation where the overall Mainland rentals business is now really hurting (for lots of reasons as I explain), a rental that still generates something -- 18 cents a month profit -- is let go rather than being policed or abandoned or raised.
Remember, the tier I pay is US $0.0030 per meter, at the rate of US $166 per sim of 65,536 meters, and 8.25% sales tax in NYS. Even if you were fortunate not to have any Internet services tax in your country/state or a lower one (like NJ or FL), you would still not be making bank on lots like this.
Raise the Rent?
That whopping 18 cents per month rapidly disappeared as it covered the handful of camp sites remaining at lower prices whose rents also didn't cover their tier. I have a choice now to raise these rents once again, or leave them as is, as the camp sites are all full, and in combination with some of the higher cost waterfronts or larger home lots, they either break even or make some modest profit. Raising the rent even 5L could cause all of them to flee; some of them; 80% occupancy is already a real loss and a reason to close an area or reformat it. The margins are razor sharp in Mainland rentals.
There really is no good solution here -- somebody might try raising rents and putting in more fancy content -- I find overstuffed, overlandscaped mesh rentals do not move. Most peole want to put out their own stuff if they are on the Mainland and not Bellisseria. There is a niche clientele to move into those very overstuffed overprice B&Bs -- but I see a fair number of them go vacant or get abandoned, too, even as my crappy shack next to them stays rented for years on end.
Hospital
How did this sad story end?
This person showed up and lamented that she had been in the hospital, and if I had contacted her, she could have paid. I apologized and reminded her of the policy.
And here where others might have hardened their heart, because she had been there for years, I offered to give her the same price at another location (unrented, but with a higher price) and even offered to BUY a cheap lot across from her previous rental, now taken, that still would have cost me about US $14 -- which I would never make back -- ever. That was madness. She didn't reply, and no doubt she's found another rental or moved to Belli where she tells stories of evil Prokofy. I didn't persist.
So... this is a rental that I have to subsdize 23 days of the 90-day period if they take the 4 week discount AND take advantage of the grace period every time -- or earn 18 cents a month from at best if they don't. If she had left, and there was no new person, I would have most likely ABANDONED this land because IT WOULD NOT SELL. The land around it for sale was either overpriced and not selling, or had sold to land choppers and ad farmers and had ad farms already on it. That's why this nice land essentially, on a quaint cobblestone by a Linden waterfalls would GET GONE because it's just dead weight. The 1024 or 1536 won by dumping this loss-leader former camp site would be well applied elsewhere.
But sadly, I've now got a tenant who is paying 4 weeks ahead -- not one week at a time as my old, long-term, prized tenant -- and that means my tier is not covered there. If he deadbeats through every two-day grace period, it will be an even greater loss.
No Solutions
Again, I can institute a price hike but it has to be done for a price globally, or a type of rental globally, not just given to one tenant. That would not be ethical. A new tenant is more likely to move out than not -- so perhaps I can soon staunch this cut like a million other little cuts and abandon this parcel, perhaps after an attempt to rent it at the somewhat higher price of .70/m.
Another thing I could so is end the grace period for high-occupancy cheaper places like camp sites. But that would require rolling back or re-doing the current script set up to work with grace periods and I don't want to wait for/pay for/test for that change now and make it globally. It's not worth it. Again: move-outs galore.
Who Rents?
The people who are in campsites and cheap small lots of 512 or 1024 costing 0.65 or 0.66 or .70 per prim are of two types:
o People from the non-Western world, poor people from developing countries as they are called euphemistally, people from countries without easy access to credit or even debit cards who have trouble buying Lindens; people whose spouses won't let them spend on SL (these are mainly women and yes, there are plenty of such women left in the world -- see the popularity of BDSM, findom, and Gor) -- poor folks.
o People slumming from their big island or homestead rentals, or bigger rentals from Anshe-land or Markland or one of the other big companies, who are either on alts so they can have affairs or get some peace and quiet from their RP lifestyles on other accounts or just people who like to explore and rent a place here and there, like they would a camp site in RL.
If somebody ends up in a cheap rental of mine like this for years, that other people might only day-trip to or have a "vacation" at on their alt, it's generally because they are poor. And that's what I'm here for. I want people who can't or won't pay for premium accounts be able to have a second life, even if only on a 256 or 512. I think it's possible; I've done it myself.
It's just costing me too much, and it will have to end, bit by bit.