You won’t be much of a landlord without any rental properties in The Sims 4: For Rent, an expansion focused on buying residential lots and earning a passive income through tenants. With two residential rentals in Tomarang and plenty more available with a few slight tweaks, there are plenty of opportunities!
The Sims 4: For Rent – More Than Meets The Eye
There’s an unexpected depth here, and not just on the coastline.
The process of buying a residential rental property in the For Rent expansion is fairly straightforward, but with so much on the menu, it can quickly become a bit cluttered. Use the guide below to help you buy rental properties and get them all set for your future tenants.
Updated on January 12, 2024: Now that we’re a month out from the launch of The Sims 4: For Rent, we’re circling back to our guide on how to become a landlord to add links to things we’ve published since launch, clarify a couple things, and tidy up our formatting.
How To Buy Residential Rental Properties
It’s easy to purchase a residential rental property in The Sims 4: For Rent to get the ball rolling on all your landlord dreams!
To get started, you’ll need to use the Business tab on your phone, the yellow briefcase icon where you’d take a job or register to freelance.
You’ll see the option in this menu to Buy a Residential Rental.
When you select the option to purchase, you’ll be brought to an overworld screen that looks a lot like the travel screen, where you’ll be able to select the residential rental property you want to buy.
The lot type will need to be set to Residential Rental, or you won’t be able to complete the purchase. This can be changed by loading into your desired lot the Manage Worlds menu.
Properties you can buy as rentals are labeled on this map with a home and key icon.
When choosing a residential rental, you cannot buy a property that’s already owned, either by another landlord with multiple units or any individual family homes.
When you hover over the lot, you can see how many units it has, details of each unit (such as current residents and what they’re paying in rent), and the cost to buy the property outright.
As you may expect, residential rental properties are not cheap! In essence, you’re buying multiple homes at once, so expect to spend a pretty Simoleon, but being a landlord can also be pretty lucrative in itself.
In Tomarang, there are two rental units already placed in the new world, but one of them is already owned when you begin the game.
You can either choose to purchase the unowned property (Sungai Point in the Koh Sahpa neighborhood), build residential rentals of your own on an unowned lot, or place premade lots from the gallery.
Tomarang, the vibrant Southeast Asian-inspired world included in The Sims 4: For Rent is currently the only world that already has residential rental properties.
These settings can be manually adjusted for other properties in other worlds (or other Tomarang lots you’d like to take over) from the Manage Worlds menu if you’d like to become a landlord elsewhere, too.
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How To Manage Residential Rentals
Managing Your Property
In The Sims 4: For Rent, Residential Rentals are classed as stores your Sim owns, which means you can access all their info via the Store Ownership tab.
After purchasing a rental, you’ll automatically be brought to the rental property for a close-up look at the new building you own.
Here, you can see into any vacant units and make changes in Build/Buy mode, but you can’t see into occupied units. The higher the value of the unit, the more you can charge in max rent for the next tenant.
You can also change the lot traits or assign lot challenges from this menu. You’ll also see a list of suggested furniture to help boost the unit’s rating.
There does seem to be a bug that occasionally locks rent at a wildly cheap price – below §10, usually.
To fix this, you’ll need to manage the lot while it’s unowned from Manage Worlds, briefly change the lot type, change it back to Residential Rental, and then purchase the rental lot from your in-family gameplay after.
Once you own a residential rental property, be sure to fill any vacancies as soon as you can to keep the fullest revenue stream coming in from your properties.
Maintenance And Emergency Events
Owning property isn’t always a cakewalk, though – sometimes, things at your rental units go wrong, and it’s up to your Sim as the landlord to do something about it.
Classed as separate events dependent on how complicated the issue is to resolve, both maintenance and emergency events require action from your landlord Sim, lest their ratings begin to go down due to neglected maintenance.
Whether you choose to have your Sim address the problems themselves by going to the lot and fixing the problem on-site or simply opt for sending professionals to your rental property to handle it for you is up to your Sim and their own Handiness skills.
Just beware that failing to address some of these issues will lead to mold growing at your rental units, which docks plenty of points from your unit scores.
