On other types of residential lot, if you use my Mortgage Shrubs, the lot rights owner will receive the interest from those.  That will enable you to set up a normal lot to play as if a rented lot.  Simply cancel out the cost of the lot with mortgage shrubs, then your next residents will pay nothing to move in, just the daily interest, or rent – whichever way you prefer to think of it.
The download contains:

NB For dorms, rent is only received if a rent is set, as there is no original code to calculate rent based on facilities in room.  Students are not required to pay extra, the uni subsidises them.

Unzip the .zip and you should have 7 .package files.  Keep them in a folder all together, in your Downloads folder.  If you do not have Apartment Life, delete ijFinance_LotRights_ApartmentOverrides.package, and if you do not have Bon Voyage, delete ijFinance_LotRights_HotelOverrides.package.  

How to play:
All the setting up is done via the small Simolean picture, which can be found in Decorative/Wall for §2.

Assigning a lot owner:
To assign your lot rights owner, have him or her on the lot, and selectable. You can bring a Sim to a lot where he does not live, either by having him travel to that lot, if it is a community or holiday lot, or if someone else lives there, by using the Teleporter cat and also using it to make him selectable. With your would-be owner as the selected Sim, click on the Simlolean picture. Choose “Give me lot income rights” There will be a dialog letting you know how much it will cost him. After clicking OK, it will let you know if he could not afford it. Until a future planned update, this will be based only on the funds available to the Sim’s family. If all is in order, the funds will be deducted from the new owner’s family, and his name will be stored on the lot token as owner. If you were told he could not afford it, but he or other members of his family have enough lot income tokens saved to cover the cost, there is an opportunity for him to cash them using options under the “General Finance…” menu. Once this has been done, your new income rights owner can leave, because any Sim can be used to operate the other menu options.

Setting the Rent:
The method of choosing a rent amount depends on what kind of lot you are setting up.
To set the rent for an AL apartment, a BV hotel or a Uni dorm, choose ‘Nightly Rent…Set amount’ from the simoleon painting menu. This brings up the OFB price setting dialog. Click on the the price tag icon on the dialog to get the custom price menu, and click the arrows up or down to set a nightly rent. The amount you choose will be the amount your owner Sim receives each night.
Note that AL apartment residents and BV hotel guests will also be charged that amount each night. Uni dorm residents are not charged the nightly rent. The lot owner receives rents each night from every unit in the owned building, even if there are unoccupied units or units occupied by non-playables. Your playable Sims are only charged when you are actually playing them. In other words, if you take a Sim family to an owned hotel for a vacation, the owner will receive the nightly rates of every room in the hotel, even if some rooms are unoccupied. If you are playing an apartment lot with playable families in different units, while you play one of those families, your lot owner will receive nightly rents from every unit in the building, but only the family you are currently playing will be charged.

If you want to charge the room rates that the game sets for apts/hotel rooms rather than choosing a custom rate, then select ‘Nightly Rent…Reset to Auto’ from the simoleon painting menu. Note that the ‘auto’ calculation only works for apts and hotels, nott dorms. For dorms you must choose a custom rate.

If you are using mortgage shrubs to charge rent on a regular residential lot, the amount of rent (or interest) paid is determined by the shrubs you place. There are two kinds of mortgage shrub, one that deducts 1,000 from the lot price and charges 10 per day, and one that deducts 10,000 from the lot price and charges 100. Place as many of these as you need to cover the purchase price of the home. The rent for the home will then be determined as a percentage of the purchase price. In other words, if the home would normally cost 32,000 simoleons, place three 10,000 mortgage shrubs and two 1,000 shrubs. The Sims you move into that lot will pay nothing to move in, but will be charged 320 a day to live there.
Note that the rent monies are paid to the owner at 3am, but are not deducted from the residents until 7am when using the mortgage shrub method.

Simlogical mortgage shrubs are available here:  Sims2_Mortgages.htm

Checking the Settings:
Select ‘Check lot owner token settings’ to check the status of your owned lots. A dialog will come up showing you the name of the owner Sim (or telling you there is no owner when you haven’t set one), how much rent you are charging, how much has accrued, and the value of the lot for the purpose of buying/selling it.
Note that if you have chosen the ‘Auto’ setting for nightly rent, this dialog will tell you the nightly rent is ‘0’, but the proper amount will be charged properly every night.

Selling the Lot:
If you choose ‘Unassign lot owner’ from the simoleon painting menu, your owner Sim will be paid for the sale of the lot at a depreciated rate, and his/her name will be cleared from the settings, and will no longer receive rent monies.

If you move out all resident Sims without unassigning the owner, the owner will still be the owner of that lot when you later move in more Sims.

Uninstalling:

To completely uninstall this mod and get back all your lot owner’s money, choose Maintenance and Debugging…Uninstall SimLogical Finance System from the simoleon painting. This will take a few Sim hours to complete.

“How to play” was written by Calisims – many thanks

You can put some of these on the lot when you are building the house before you move any sims in, and therefore reduce the price your sims have to pay when moving in, allowing greedy sims to move into quite a luxurious house without having to work their way up the property ladder.

Two shrubs – dark green one for a §1,000 mortgage at §10 a day interest, the brighter green one for a §10,000 mortgage at §100 a day

NB: Buy several shrubs to make up the total value of the loan required!

(no overrides)(requires Open For Business)

Sims walk past this on the way out and have their shopping and credit cards scanned instantly.  It also gets them to leave after purchasing so they don’t hang about being a nuisance.

(no overrides)(requires Open For Business)

Menu offers:

• Start Auto Restock at Cost (owner has to pay normal price and needs craftables in his inventory)
• Start Auto Restock for Free (all items restocked free and craftables appear out of thin air)
• Stop Auto Restock.

Sign will check around every 15 sim minutes.  No animation is required on the part of any sim.  Items just appear in their appropriate places.

Updated 22nd June 2008 to improve handling of animatable objects such as teddy bears.

This is a separate object and does not override the original shop sign.

You can use this the same as a normal shop sign, or switch it over to automatic, when it will open, close, call employees to work and send them home again at preset times of your choice.  Each action may be preset individually so that for instance you can have your employees in place before the shop opens.  If there are any of these events you don’t want automated, leave the setting at “-1” instead of a proper hour.

If you don’t want the shop open on any particular day, toggle to “manual” control the night before.

NB. I recommend you install only one of these per lot, on lots where you use this hack.  On community lots, if you do not want the business to behave as if open and employees to turn up automatically as soon as your owner arrives, you should also place one original Maxis sign – but do not use it.

Requires Automatic Open Sign above.  The automatic arrive and leave times only operate when the Automatic Open Sign above is set to Auto, to avoid employees being called in on days the business is not open.

Use one of these for each employee.  You can assign this only when the employee is actually on the lot, but it stays assigned after they leave.  When you assign it, the employee’s picture appears on the token.   Set arrive and leave times, or call in to work or dismiss any time manually.

Please note:  This item was created and named before Bon Voyage was released, and is nothing to do with hotels on holiday destinations

ijHotelPodium.zip  (no globals)(requires Open For Business)

This is a separate podium (doesn’t overwrite anything the Maxis one does) that you can use on owned business lots where you want the customers to stay and do other things as well as eating.  The usual Maxis one virtually forces them to queue for a meal and then pretty much forces them to go home after eating or if they had to wait too long.

Click on file links to download:

Made a bit more attractive so Sims will use them for fun.  Payment is 50 Simoleans a go, because Sims tend to stay on these a while. Let me know if the visitors end up with skill points after using them as I didn’t get round to testing that.

All these revenue generating games in one zipfile!

Sims in current family use this for free, visitors pay 20 Simoleans per helping.  Made to be slightly more attractive than normal so visitors will use in preference to any other on the lot.

This buffet has inbuilt no-spoil no-empty features, which work independently of whether or not you have the EndlessBuffet patch.  Also works on community lots.

Vomit and Play options disabled

Fully functioning Community Lot phone without the stand.  Offered here is a version that Fat D did further work on so that you don’t need to use move_objects etc to get it against the wall properly.  This is a new object and does not replace the original community lot telephone; however it functions the same.

ijCommPhoneRecolBlack_byjen.zip

Recolour of above in black and silver made by Jen W