The Tenants

The Tenants is a highly engaging simulation game where players build their real estate empire from scratch. Purchase and renovate old apartments, select suitable tenants from a pool of options, sign contracts, and earn rent to continue your operations. As the game progresses, players will encounter more tenants with diverse personalities and various problems. Remain calm and collected to handle tenant issues, win their favor, and renew your leases. The game offers players a wealth of customization options, allowing them to freely customize room furniture and decorations to attract tenants and increase occupancy rates.

Gameplay of The Tenants:

RENOVATE: Buy old and ruined apartments, invest in them and attract wealthier clients. Design your apartments and give them a polished look. Get rid of that old paint and buy some new furniture or just change the floors.

RENT: Do background checks and select the perfect tenants for your units. Decide which tenants you want to make business with. You never know what's gonna happen: annoyed neighbours, problematic tenants, police involved?

MANAGE: Deal with your tenants and their issues. Decide what kind of landlord you want to be. Invest wisely to achieve maximum profit. Keep an eye out for the best bargain, and strike when you see an opportunity.

Useful Tips of The Tenants:

Keep The Room Scores High: When it comes to building the rooms for your home, you will want to aim for the highest prestige score possible. To see what your prestige score is, simply hold down Alt and click any of the floors in the building you're renovating. Doing this will also give you an idea of the items you can place in the room to help raise the prestige score. The higher the prestige score, the more the tenant will be willing to pay you.It is worth taking into account that larger rooms do tend to require more items to keep the prestige score up. Therefore, when it comes to building the layout of the property, aim to construct smaller rooms, which you can then fill with all the right items to help maximize your prestige score. If you can maintain a score of around 110 or more, then you're sure to find that tenants are happier to pay you whatever it is that you ask.

Return To Your Old Properties As Often As Possible: As you progress further and further into The Tenants, you will no doubt unlock more items. As you acquire more items, you will of course be able to add them to your properties — specifically your older properties, which would have started out with little to no character or major appeal. If you can return to your older homes and update them frequently, then you will in turn receive a well-deserved boost to your prestige score. And again, the higher the prestige score, the more money you are likely to make each payday.To unlock more items for your properties, aim to complete quests, purchase new properties, and fulfill requests. For each task you complete, you will receive XP, which can be used to unlock random Item Boxes. You can keep track of your accumulated XP in the Progression tab on your in-game phone.

Don't Get Greedy With The Bank: Taking out loans is a worryingly easy way to get swamped in debt, which is precisely why you should avoid taking out loans you simply cannot pay back. And while it's easy to be swayed into the concept of borrowing money to make money, it doesn't always pay off, and it can actually come back to bite you if you aren't careful with your finances.If you do fail to pay your loans, then the bank may just repossess one of your properties to help make up the monies owed. Understandably, this is the last place you, as a landlord, would want to be in. Therefore, you should never get greedy when it comes to taking out loans. If you don't have a steady cash flow to keep the bank at bay, then you could just lose a chunk of your weekly income from rent.

Player Comments of The Tenants:

This game is an obvious early access title, so please beware that things might change quickly.

The Tenants feels like a light mixture of The Sims with an Economic Simulator. You spend most of your time decorating apartments to rent them out for as high of an amount of money as possible. Afterwards you can watch your tenant go along with their life, occasionally calling you to report something being broken or asking to re-paint their walls. From time to time you re-negotiate their contracts. In between you spend your time doing freelance work like renovating a kitchen, babysitting other tenants or trying to sell a house for someone else. Everything you do earns you experience, which in turn unlocks new items for you to place in your own buildings. The main goal is of course to earn enough money to buy more apartments and begin the cycle anew without going broke.

The good:

The animations are very charming and the graphics feel quite polished, even at this stage

The system of unlocking your items through leveling your character feels weird at first, but becomes a main drive for progress very fast

Even in early access, the (potential) available choice of items is greater than in most base Sims games I have played so far

It feels rewarding to refurbish a run down or empty building and then see how much money people are willing to pay to live there

In regards to early access: bugs, complaints and ideas seem to be fixed and implemented at a commendable pace (as far as possible). Even after only two patches since release, many features that had been talked about in the forums have been added or fine tuned.

The not so good:

Currently the cycle of re-negotiation feels a bit short. I can not imagine anyone in reality living at a place where you have to talk prices every 30, 60 or 120 days or be evicted. I know that haggling is a major feature of the game, but the intervals are still very short

Likewise it is odd that there is no function to say "keep same rent as before". You have to negotiate. Every. Single. Time. And if you start out with the price that you agreed on last time, your tenants will always lowball you. This ends in a cycle of demanding too much, haggling up, and agreeing on a higher price than before, until they pay 8k dollar for a one-room apartment (for one month (in the slums)).

While much has been done, the late game still ends up feeling repetitive and slow at the current time. After ~20 hours you will have seen pretty much every available mission, and doing the same rare mission for the 10th time becomes tiresome.

Likewise the game itself tends to become grindy towards the later stages, with house prices being so high that you have to save for months on end, including bank loans, doing the same missions again and again to earn enough money for the next building. A 3x or 4x times speed would definitely help here.

While items have a great variety already, tenants tend to repeat quickly. It's both odd and amusing to see three 19-year old grey-haired men visit your place. (also no crazy cat ladies yet!)

Something that has already been tweaked in the recent patches, but still was rather prevalent when I played: when potential tenants are rating the apartment during open house, they value the highest priced items the most. Item sets, color coordination or similar things do not appear to have much influence. This results in the habit of just plopping down the most expensive item available, even if it ends up looking horrid.

Likewise, the tenant feedback on what influences their decision or potential price limits is still very limited. I know that half the fun is finding out how you best cater to drunk, gaming or similar personalities, but at least some basics would definitely help.

The absolutely subjective:

Style-wise it would be great to see the city actually improve from all the investment you put into the infrastructure. The first district are literal slums, separated from the second one with a barbed wire wall. It makes you feel like stereotypical slum lord. But of course completely subjective.

Summary: As long as you aware that the game is still early access, it's a charming, entertaining and already polished game that easily entertains you for 20-30 hours at this point. If you're into Sims-like apartment building and basic economy aspects it definitely is worth its money. If the devs continue like this, you'll definitely get to watch a gem develop.

FAQs of The Tenants:

How does X work?

Our community featuring a plethora of great individuals will be more than glad to help you in-game! Yes, the development for consoles has begun, but there’s no ETA yet on when it will come to the public.

Will The Tenants have any DLCs?

Yes, the first DLC is planned to be released in the summer of 2023.

What are the community event's achievements?

These are seasonal events that will be held by the developers for players in the community during seasons like Easter, Halloween, Christmas, etc.

I can't complete a job. It seems impossible, and there are too many requirements. Is that a bug?

All jobs in the game have been thoroughly tested and verified to be possible. You might be referring to puzzle jobs, which can be harder than regular jobs, so it might be best to avoid them if they're a challenge. You can identify these jobs by their puzzle piece icons.

Final Thoughts:

Become a landlord and deal with problematic tenants as you build your rental property empire. Decide how to react to annoyed neighbors or police interventions. Will you design your apartment for a group of gamer friends or an aspiring musician looking for a new home?Take care of your tenants!Decide which tenants you want to make business with. React to various situations... you never know what's gonna happen: annoyed neighbours, problematic tenants, police involved? Gotta stay alert!