Being A Landlord In Dinkum - A Guide To Rentals

The official release now lets us rent out four guest homes. So for all of you budding real estate tycoons, here's how to maximize your investment.

This guide is a work in progress, so check back as I conduct more testing and experimention!

How Do I Get Started?

The first step is to get a guest house deed from Fletch, place it where you want, place the building materials inside the green construction box and then wait until Fletch's construction crew finishes.

You can use the blue customization kits sold by John at his shop to either customize the outside or upgrade the house to its largest size. Guests houses can only be upgraded once in size. Upgrades cost 220,000 dink and require additional material.

You can decorate the guest house the same way you decorate your house, by placing furniture you get as rewards, buy from Melvin, or find in the recycling bin. You can also use the interior walls and archways from Melvin's shop to create custom rooms. Don't forget to swap out the carpet and wallpaper.

To start renting, you'll need to get the rent sign from John's shop for 50,000 dink apiece. These are on rotation, so it may take a while for them to show up in his shop. Place these at the front of the house and then interact with them. You'll want to click the option to start renting and one of the new four NPCs will show up the next day. Collect the rent from the little table every Wednesday.



Repeat this up to four times to get all four guest houses rented. You don't have to rent all of them or any of them. It's up to you how to use the guest houses, but this is a very passive way of making money.

To stop renting and evict the tenant, interact with the sign and chose the stop renting option. You can still enter the guest house when it's rented without asking the tenant. That's illegal in most countries, but not in your town!

How To Maximize Rents

Rents appear to be based on the value price of the decorations you put in the guest house.

Expect the developer to tweak and hotfix the rent calculation. So don't get too attached to any decoration system.

You can consult the value of the various pieces of furniture, clothing, and decorations on the wiki:

https://dinkum.fandom.com/wiki/Furniture
https://dinkum.fandom.com/wiki/Clothing

Minimalist furniture tends to be the most valuable overall, so if you're trying to maintain a theme or continuity of decorations, that set is your best bet.

It also appears that the game only counts one of each decoration, so you can't double, triple, or just fill the guest house with Nordic beds. I tried two gold fish trophies and the rent was the same as one gold fish trophy.

After fairly extensive testing the following items are included in the calculation:

• Furniture such as placed decorations like plushies, trophies, the boombox.
  
• Equipment
  
• Placed clothing as decorations
  
• Mannequins themselves add to the rent, but not the clothing that's on the mannequin

Items that do not count in the rent calculation:

• Food in storage (includes foods in the fridge)
  
• Items in display cases
  
• Weapons/Tools/Furniture/Clothing in storage, such as crates, dressers, or toolracks
  
• Carryables not in display cases
  
• Placed Bugs and Fish

The most valuable furniture decoration are the contest awards and they alone will drive your rents to the sky. Food items that have been turned into decoration do not retain their original selling values, but instead adopt new, much lower values. Placed apparel, particularly hats can add considerable value to your rent.

To get rents that would make even billionaires blush, you'll need a combination of high value furniture, high value equipment, and high value apparel on display. Minimalist furniture, paired with a halo, tiny top hat, or elf ears, with the contest trophies (each award tier seems to be counted separately), along with an auto-sorter, blast furnace, and key-cycler.

Be aware that you need to leave walkable tiles or the rent will decrease.



Here's the interior of that rental house. It's definitely not pretty inside, but it generates a half million a week rent:

What About The Exterior?

It does not seem to matter what's on the outside of the guest house. I built a hot tub, BBQ area, and pool for my rentals and the game didn't take it into account when calculating the rent.



So if you want to ignore the exterior, feel free. But if you want to go all out creating a luxury villa, also feel free. It's your game, play it how you like.

Other players have noted small (less than 1,000 dink) boosts to the rent if the rental is near certain other NPC buildings. I have not tested this but they seem quite immaterial compared to adding better furniture or apparel.

Who's Renting My Overpriced, I mean Reasonably Priced Guest Houses?

There are four new NPCs that can rent.

Forest, Mason, River, and Doug. Each of them will rent a specific color deeded house. Which is going to be a problem for people who have turned one or more of their guests houses into something else, like a workshop or gemstone storage space. You could just rent that out, with low earnings to get the NPC tied to that color deed to show up. But this may pose a problem for players expecting NPCs to randomly be selected to rent.

Note that the NPCs do not interact with the furniture inside the house, so you can use them for your multiplayer friends.

Next Up For Testing

Here's what's next for testing to see what changes rent:

• Do complete furniture sets grant a rent boost?

Check Out My Other Guides!

Looking for tips, tricks, and Easter Eggs? I got you covered!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3410776286

New To the Game and looking for First Year Tips?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350451381

Are you interested in a tropical getaway?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3087556135

Interested in mining mountains of metal ores?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3090461331

Are you confused about brewing?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2953802977

Short on keys and looking for more?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094604586

Want to farm other stuff beyond what Rayne lets you?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3206867604

Want a flying buddy or a silly hat?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132627357

What’s the deal with all the Autumn mushrooms?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3225363997

Interested in manipulating NPCs for your own gain?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3184047440

[Dimossa]

Can you list items you have in that rental.

[100% Recycled Awesome]

I'm hesitant to put any more testing in as the dev is almost certainly going to adjust the calc.

[FRD]

@Grethor

Interesting information you got there.

what is the intial rent for a house?
my houses all started at 1750 dinks.
they are all close to the bandstand and the bank by accident : )

is the intial rent lower if they were not close to the other buildings?

I've also created a spreadsheet. It doesn't contain much information yet. However, I have some screenshots of rent increases that still need to be entered.
I put a piece in each house every evening and take a screenshot of the rent and the inserted item.
now i have to put this data into my spreadsheet but i was to lazy to do it : )

If you actually want to create a spreadsheet, I can also send you my data.

[|FG| Grethor |IOA|]

I have noticed that item prices do not in fact alter the rent in a linear manner. For example a minimalist bed is worth less than a regal bed, yet increases the rent more. Also the decor itself adds to the rent, though I could not tell you which is best or worse. Exterior doesn't seem to affect the rent at all, so play the the aesthetic of your village there. I have noticed that having the home near stores does seem to have a small effect though. Placing a home near the Bandstand for example added about 500 Dinks in rent vs one on the outskirts of town. A home near the Bank increased it about 250. I'm thinking of making a creative game and just going through and changing each decoration 1 by 1 and putting each cost increase on a spreadsheet. But even with 4 houses, you are talking about probably 10+ hours of work there.

[100% Recycled Awesome]

FRD, could be. But it does seem at its simplest the more valuable the decoration, the more it adds to rent. Furniture seems to have a different assignment than decorations along with equipment as I tried the two crowns which 3 million a piece and they didn't add much to the rent as I expected, where equipment really blew the rent to the sky. It's tedious to test as the game doesn't update rents in real time.

We may want to wait a bit for the developer to tweak this before committing the time to each item.

[FRD]

thx for the great work!

This is really helpful and the only source with real information on rent increases in guesthouses that I could find anywhere online. :)

using this guide, I started testing which items increases the rent by what amount.

maybe there is a formula of which the selling price of an item increases the rent by which amount?

if there is no formula, a list of each single amount of the rental increase for each item would be great.

@100% Recycled Awsome: are u interested in finding out the formula or creating a list of rental increase for each item?

if so, i would share my results and the amounts I have found out so far.

[Death]

Great to know how much we can make! My rentals only making 2,345 and 4,559. Need more furniture lol