Carl's Real Estate Mod - Important Fix + QoL Improvements (Patreon)

Carl's Real Estate Mod is now available to Early Access Patrons. The mod's goal is to allow you to purchase nearly all non-residential lots and build them up using your own household funds. Players can pursue a new aspiration that is challenging and meant to be completed over the long term. Here's a summary of everything in the mod. 

Update v1.066 - Ownerships Fixed

• Ownership is now finally fixed with regards to manage worlds! 

Update v1.062

• Fixed a bug that was sending players to the wrong zone when using browse. This led some people to think buying was broken. It was sometimes sending you to the wrong lot, which could be ineligible.

Update v1.061

• Quick fix for a critical bug regarding the sell interaction that was sometimes not clearing property ownership and caused all sorts of havoc. Thanks for your reports, you make my mods better!

Update v1.06

• The Sell interaction will now appear on the phone. You can use this to get rid of a single property you don't want, or click to remove ALL properties (be careful with this, it's instant!). You should do this before uninstalling the mod to remove lot ownership, or else the game will still think you own them.
• A lot of cleanup on phone interactions, to avoid them stuffing up your menu. If a Sim isn't a property owner, we don't need the upgrade menu, and if a lot isn't in the list of allowed types, it will no longer appear as an option. Also if you own 0 lots, it won't offer you the sell interaction for example.

Update v1.051 - Quick Fix

• Made sure property owners can ALWAYS buy upgrades. 

Update v1.05 - New Features!

• A Handyman can now be called when objects are broken using the new Real Estate Repair Service option on the phone. They'll charge you $250 per item, but this will fix all broken objects on a lot. This is to help with the heavy travel involved in the mod.
• There is a new Browse Real Estate feature on the phone. This is incapable of showing you values of gallery/heavily modified lots, but will show you the vanilla lot prices, sorted by unfurnished value. You can get started in real estate much sooner than you think using this. Some unfurnished lots are like 7k (beaches). It shows all worlds and purchasable lots. No more guesswork! Unfortunately, we can't see lot values when off lot. I could cry. Ok, maybe I did, a little...
• NOTE I SWITCHED TO ZIP BECAUSE OF PATREON AND BROWSERS BREAKING MY FILES

Next, I'll be making a sell button for players who want to ditch their real estate. I need to do much more testing on this to make sure it's safe for wide use. We will want to make sure if one household sells, another can buy, and things like that.

Update v1.041 - Critical Hotfix

• Made a mistake today and was reported an issue where players' lots could break *everything* either existing or on first purchase. Sorry for the trouble, ugh.

Update V1.04 - Balance and Quality of Life Improvements.

• Toned down breakdown chance (base rate) so objects won't break so often with several properties.
• Modernization and other upgrades have had their costs reduced about 35-40%. They were scaling too high on large properties, making it take way too long to pay off (sorry).
• Modernization will improve breakdown rates when applied, while also helping the most to improve star rating, justifying its higher cost.
• The repair spell (cast by a Sim or their clone) will now correctly repair objects.
• The water pipes upgrade will slightly reduce breakdown rates.
• It's now much easier to see broken objects. A new (actually useful) notification and button appear when you travel to a lot with broken objects. Click the button to focus the camera on a random broken object and trigger a visual showing what needs repaired. It will pick a random object on each press in case something gets stuck.
• A reminder that you are able to upgrade objects to unbreakable to avoid breaking objects in the first place.

In the next improvements update I will be introducing a new browse real estate menu that will show all places Sims can by. I expect this to take a couple days but will be worth the work. Thanks for your support, everyone!

Update V1.03 - Critical Bugfix & New OPTIONS!

• Shift-click the mailbox to find the new Carl Real Estate Settings button. From here, you can change the default 7 days to collect rent to 1, 2, 3, or even 14 if you want. The values will scale automatically based on days (dividing by 7 if rent is delivered each day for instance). Rent will start delivering the next day in most cases, but using weird values may result in an odd rent day or shifting rent days.
• Also features a setting to modify rent, so you can cut it in half (use 50), or double it (200). Default is 100 = 100% of normal rent before it's adjusted based on frequency.
• Fixed a bug where owning vet clinics and retail might throw an LE and interrupt rent.

Update V1.02 -  Critical Bugfix

• This update corrects a serious issue preventing Sims from being owners of retail, vets, and restaurants. Thank you SO MUCH for reporting this, and I'm happy to have been able to fix it swiftly.

Update V1.01 - Quick fix for non-English versions

• Fixed names/descriptions not showing.

Buying Lots

Sims can purchase Real Estate using the phone (under household menu). You need to be on a lot that can be purchased to use this. You can purchase lots either furnished or unfurnished, which will automatically clear all the objects off for you. Unfurnished is cheaper, but you'll need to make sure the lot has all required objects to begin paying rent.

Owning & Maintaining Lots

Lot owners receive rent each Monday at around 1:00 PM. While owner of a lot, you will need to take care of them. Occasionally, things will break down on lots and the companies renting from you will not pay if the lot becomes too broken down. You can reduce the chances of breakdowns by upgrading objects to unbreakable.

The broken objects feature is designed to be smart, and any time you enter/exit build mode it will tally up how many objects are able to be broken on your lot. It considers those objects that are already unbreakable and/or those you have upgraded. So if you can make all objects unbreakable on a lot, then it will never suffer breakdowns.

Lot Ratings

Lot Star Ratings are impacted by three things - Lot Beauty, Upgrades, and Broken Objects. Having too many objects broken will make the rating pointless. Beauty uses The Sims 4's decorated system, but to prevent players needing to place many high-score objects, I tweaked the system.

I've tuned the low end decorative items to give bonus points. This way, you can decorate a bit more to your liking with low to mid-tier items instead of feeling like you need to game the system. You will most certainly require upgrades to make it to 5-star, but upgrades exist to help push your lot to 5-stars. This is to let players who do not wish to do so much building still enjoy the Real Estate system.

Sims like seeing their properties become better and will get a nice moodlet when a business achieves a new rating level.

Lot Summary Screen

Using your phone, select Real Estate - Check Properties to see a list of all properties owned by your Sim's household. If you pick a lot from here, your Sim will automatically travel so you can go spend that money to build and upgrade. When objects are broken, it will inform you.

The Real Estate Mogul Aspiration

My Real Estate mod includes a new Aspiration - Real Estate Mogul exists to give you some difficult long-term goals in The Sims 4. It starts with only requiring you to buy a lot and purchase an upgrade, but I do not do tutorial aspirations. The next 2 tiers are much more difficult and sure to take you a while to complete without cheating.

The reward for this Aspiration will be expanded upon later, but for now will make your Sim repair all objects MUCH faster, and also improves the success rate of the Impress with Real Estate social.

Impress with Real Estate

Once a Sim has bought Real Estate, they can attempt to 'Impress with Real Estate' from the friendly social menu. This is not just any social, it's got a bit of brains behind it. This will make the Sim you're talking to assess your properties' current state in the beauty, ratings, and maintenance categories and tell you about your worst/best properties. Failing is embarrassing, but Sims who make an impression will find much gratification in the envy of others.

Limitations

Residential lots may not be purchased yet. I will experiment with the possibility down the road. Rentals from vacation destinations etc are also not purchasable, and we may need to add a few lot types to the list.

The bottom-right Business panel does work with my mod, but there are a few buttons I could not disable (perks, biz summary, and employee management) none of these systems are used in the mod, so ignore them as they will do nothing. 

Future Plans

More random events, potentially ownership of residential lots, and more depth to the ratings system and other systems in the mod. I have a lot of ideas to improve this project.

Compatibility

I tried hard to make this mod compatible. It uses almost nothing from the game directly and is made with all custom systems. Any mod that also gives you ownership of a specific lot is likely to conflict, but they might be used together so long as a single lot is not bought with both.

Instructions: Download and extract the zip file to your Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods folder.

Ensure Script Mods are turned on in Game Options > Other. If you have trouble with the download or the mod working, attempt using save as on the files as some browsers treat ts4script files incorrectly.