I was curious, tho. How do you start a Real Estate business? You said that you simply buy a small space, purchase a deed and resell. Is the deed for a community lot? or for housing? Or do you keep selling the same deed over and over?

You can do it as a home business or as a community lot. You do need some money to begin with though - suggest buying an empty lot to begin with since it costs less, then put the deed up for sale. You can't sell a residential house, but everything else is fair game. Once you have more money, you can buy more expensive lots to re-sell.

If a townie buys the lot, the lot goes back to the community. So you'll be able to purchase it again and sell it again (to the same townie even).

This is my first post and despite TS3 being right around the corner, I thought I'd throw in some of my "findings" for you avid TS2ers.

Before You Buy
When You plan on owning a community lot business, I reccomend building it to a budget BEFORE your Sim buys it, but don't stock it with anything. Buy what you are planning on putting in your shop on your home lot, that way it doesn't take a massive bite into your profit margin, for example, if you want a furniture shop, buy beds, tables, chairs, chest of drawers, wardrobes etc and stash them in your lot owner's inventory, then when you send them to their business, lay everything out and mark it up with the price tag tool.

This can also count for home businesses, if you've decided what you're going to make your home business as, stock up before hand, make your cakes or toys or buy your furniture before phoning the real estate people, makes the profit margin easier to balance/overcome.

I say this because before I started doing this, I really struggled to remain out of the red after restocking and the likes, so yeah, it's quite helpful if you want to avoid being stuck in the red.

Even Cheap Sims Need To Pee
I've also noticed that it's cheaper to build a toilet in the corner of a building than it is to buy the stalls as the stall costs $700 when you can buy the cheapest loo for $300, a door for $80 (I think) and 3 walls for $210, hey presto, you've saved yourself $110, not much really, but it makes a difference if your Sim is just starting out or you have some sort of realism hack on, and you don't really need to paint the walls in the beginning anyhow. It's just a slight build tip, and you don't really need sinks in shops, strangers don't need to wash their hands anyhow, it's not like your sims will gross out if someone touches them...

Talking To Your Customers
When dealing with customers, I have found that they accept sells more often when you interact with them before hand. If you don't know them that well, stick to a joke, but if you're confident they'll accept the gesture, admire them, it's a shorter interaction and chances are you'll still have the time to run to the checkout before anyone gets angry.

Your Checkout
When placing your checkout (or things around your checkout) make sure there are at least three rows between the counter and any objects on the side people will queue, there's nothing more infuriating than Sims walking into eachother, shrugging, complaining and trying to get between a sim and an object, as this leaves them waiting longer, decreases their moods and loyalty, and ends up leaving you clearing up a pile of bags.

Networking; And How I Like It (Requires Apartment Life)
The great thing about owning Open For Business and Apartment Life is the reputation system and how people who like you decide to "Network" with you. Networking for me has ranged from Electronic Devices, Friends in High Places, Job Offers and Wholesale Discounts. If someone networks with you when you're working on your business, chances are you'll get some customer loyalty from it aswell. It's also good when they give you stuff, because if you don't want to use it, you can sell it then and there and it will add to your green bar of profit (plus they give you some REALLY expensive stuff, which amazes me as I had to randomly generate my own townies and they've all claimed to be dirt poor... or a Hippy Senator) or you can plonk it somewhere in your store to sell it, possibly even to the person who just gave it to you!

What else... oh right!

The Reporter
If you do realise a reporter has invaded your shop at an inconvenient time, like if you have a lot of "out of stock" signs everywhere, direct them to an object, any object, preferably one s/he can take their time gawking at and start stocking, then begin to use your best tactics on them, interrupt their browsing at good moments and admire/joke with them then attempt a sale, hopefully they're in a good enough mood. If you see them head to the counter and there are still other people browsing in the shop, ignore the other people temporarily and get a Sim to the checkout, if you keep them waiting their loyalty will go down, the more +Loyalty Stars they get, the better your review will be, though if you see a lot of -Loyalty Stars, you may have blown it, but fear not! Just prioritise with them first, everyone else second.

Renovating or Redecorating your Business
If you do think you need to make your business larger or change things about it, make sure your business is as stocked as it can be and check to see if your still in profit, this stops you from having any major issues with income/outgoings because you made your shop bigger. You don't need to do this of course, but if you like being in the green and making an overall profit, it's highly reccomended.

I think that covers a few things I haven't seen noted, so yeah. Hope this Helped! Any Critisisms are welcomed =3

Hey everyone,
This is my first time posting to the forum... Up until now I've found most any answer I needed before this without having to ask... until now.. Now I'm having the worst problem with my restaurant and the stupid reporter... let me explain.

I have a remarkable neighborhood going. Been making it off and on for a couple years now. It's called Kricket Hollow, and it includes all the different pre-made neighborhoods, including all the expansion packs, all rolled into one. I made this neighborhood to finally fix one of things that always bothered me about the game.... which is Sims from one neighborhood not being able to interact with Sims from a different neighborhood. But then one day after I got OFB I was playing and Florence Delirosa strolled past my Sims house, and I realized that in any given neighborhood, a Sim can interact with another Sim living in a Sub-neighborhood, in particular the shopping districts!

That's when it occured to me how to combine all the neighborhoods together... make them all into shopping districts!!! It took a little work... I first had to make a main neighborhood, which in this case is my "Kricket Hollow", and make all the standard sub-neighborhoods; Downtown, Bluewater Village, and all the vacation resorts and universities.
Then, one at a time, I made a new shopping district to match each of the other regular neighborhoods. I started with Pleasantview, using the same road map, and made the landscape match as best possible. Then I left my shopping district Pleasantview and loaded the standard Pleasantview neighborhood, added all of the houses to the house and lot thing... including the ones with the families, like the Goths. This was the most important, to keep the families in their houses. That way the move with the house!
Then went back to my Kricket Hollow neighborhood, loaded the Pleasantview shopping district, and put all the houses where they belonged... and it worked!!!

I did this with all 6 Neighborhoods... Belladonna Cove took the longest because of the landscaping... the original has lots of alleyways and such.... but now all the different Sims, from all the different neighborhoods, can all interact together... I can finally Sims like Cassandra Goth hanging out with Juliette Capp in my restaurant...

Which gets me to my restaurant... using the advice I found here, especially things like the Customer Limit Adjuster & Hungerinator, I've finally got a great resaurant going. It's up to 7 stars now, making a fairly decient profit, and my customers seem all sorts of happy. It's got 40 seats total (including the bar), plus a pool table... about a quarter million in decorations & plants & stuff... it's really quite gorgeous... I'd eat there!
I have a staff of 6, my manager, 1 chef, 1 host, 2 servers, & 1 bartender... I keep the Customer Limit Adjuster at 20, which is about what the servers can handle all at once without getting too jammed up... and if it fills up to 20 total customers all at once my managers jumps in on her own to help the servers... Oh, and there are 6 snapdragons back in the kitchen and behind the bar, so my workers can pretty much go all day without a break.
It's actually a very efficiant and beautiful thing to watch it all run itself.... my owner usually sits back and plays pool during the day, and I can more or less just sit back and watch him make $$$...

Until the reporter shows up and gives the place a bad review! I hate this guy!!! Can someone give me some advice??? What am I doing wrong? Every time he shows up he gives my place a bad review!! I keep having to exit without saving so I can replay that day without him. What to I need to do to make him happy? Do I interact with him? Talk to him? Until now I thought I was supposed to leave him alone and let him check the place out... but that's not working.

This restaurant should easily get a best of the best... and all I can think is I'm not doing something right...
Can someone help me out? Any advice would be most welcome!!!
Thanks!

This is where you went wrong.

Putting occupied lots into your lot bin will destroy your neighborhood. Placing improperly-cleaned occupied lots from your lot bin into your neighborhood will destroy your neighborhood.

Therefore, your neighborhood (including all subhoods) is now corrupt and unfixable. Please see this thread to understand how to move sims correctly:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...elp:Moving_Sims

Since this is not on topic for this thread, if you have further questions about this issue please post in the Sims 2 Help forum, or here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=394352

There is also a correct way to combine all of the pre-made neighborhoods. Again, off topic for this thread, so post in the Sims 2 Help forum if you want help with correctly creating a mega-hood, or post here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=420196

OK, first off, I got the reporter thing figured out... Turns out I needed to direct all my attention at making him happy and I did fine.

This thing about moving lots is interesting... I didn't know this. But so far my neighborhood seems to be running fine. I have not encountered any instances of duplicate sims showing up on the same lot.
But I may have gotten lucky, because I caught where the article states:

If the family was completely brand new and knew nobody outside of their family (nobody that lived outside of the lot) then you might be safe. But if they knew other sims, any other sims, you've created duplicates of those sim files in the neighborhood you've moved them into

I think this may have saved me... because when I made this neighborhood, it was from a completely clean re-install, and I didn't play any of the families prior to trying this neighborhood. I did this on purpose because I wanted all the families pristine and unplayed. I checked the number of files in my neighborhoods characters folder, there are currently 1999 neighbors total. A lot, but I have a fairly new computer with tons of processor and RAM... it's been running fine so far with a population of two thousand.

So hopefully there won't be any future glitches. But I'm glad you pointed this out to me, if there are any problems with it in the future I'll know what to look for... then I'll have to do it all over... again... this time doing it the hard way.

Again, most of your post is off-topic for this thread. You should really be posting here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=394352

However, I can tell you with 100% certainty that you were not saved. Even though you personally did not play these families, they are very interconnected and you now have a mega-hood which is full of invalid references to non-existent sims.

Now back to our regularly scheduled discussion.

OK, real quick as far as the mega-hood, apparently my comments were redirected where they belong, and I'm gonna respond to it in just a second. But in a nutshell you were right and my new mega-hood is already looking great!

As far as getting back to topic and my original question about the reporter in my resturant... I figured out how to get a best of the best award before I deleted my old neighborhood.

To get a best of the best award in a restaurant, it first helps a lot to know who the reporter is ahead. Dolphin's Business adjuster has a reporter notification setting that gives you a 15 minute head's up that the reporter is on the way. This helps a lot and can be found here: http://nene.modthesims.info/download.php?t=136990

When the reporter first shows up and walks to the podium and grabbed a menu, I walked over and used a sales pitch, offering him the meal at ridiculously cheap... this got a gold star. Luckily there were no other customers at the podium, so he got seated immediately, and this also got a gold star... lastly I switched my owner to server and served him immediately... I made sure to get him his food as soon as possible after he ordered, which got me the third gold star... at this point he got up and awarded me a Best of the Best award.

The biggest issue with getting a good review, and the reason I was having such a hard time, is because I'm also using the Customer Limit Adjuster, which is mentioned earlier in this post. This is a great tool, and used properly it's great for getting a packed restaurant.... it's fun setting the customer count to 16 and watching my employees actually act like a busy restaurant... except the reporter hates having to wait.
This is the key thing was when I knew he was on the way, I immediately turned the customer count down to 3 so the game wouldn't spawn any new customers until the ones already there were finished... and luckily most all of them were already seated when my reporter arrived, so I could focus all my attention on him.
If you know the reporter is on the way, or plan on spawning one, it is vital to make sure you have as few customers around as possible so you can suck up to the reporter, so to speak... lol... then do so as much as possible, and the Best of the Best award is yours!

That's a great thread. It was always a mystery to me why some sims got plusses after complaining, instead of minuses. I'd never guess that it depends on charisma. And I didn't know about the tips.

I don't know if charasma plays a factor or not, but I've noticed my sales people tend to do better with a high charasma, gold badge or not... I have to wonder if a higher charasma is a factor in making the sale.... it seems like it should. After all, who would you be more likely to buy something from, a super hot charasmatic sales person, or an ugly nasty one???