How should I map houses rented by an agency?

General talk
1

I’m going through and fixing JOSM warnings in a town, and discovered that someone created a relation between several buildings at different addresses that are rented out yearly to students by a rental agency. The buildings all have the name of the rental agency on them, so it makes sense to group them. I marked it as a multipolygon, and I now need to find a descriptive tag for it.

Here’s full tags on it:
operator=$NAME
type=multipolygon
website=$WEBSITE
???=???

Here’s the tags I found and decided not to use:

rental=house
this tag is for where you actually go to rent the houses. it would belong on the head office of the rental agency

residential=apartments
this tag is only for use with areas with the land_use tag, which isn’t supposed to be used on buildings, much less a relation consisting of buildings

building=apartments
really doesn’t feel right because these the multipolygon consists of many different buildings, some of which are themselves part of multipolygon relations.

I’m really stumped here, would appreciate some help.

2

Hi, Each individual building is a building=apartments. A situation like this is not adequately described by a multipolygon relation. A better solution is to use a site relation, please see:- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:site A site relation seems to be the best option however there are problems which are pointed out on that webpage.

3

There’s your 1st mistake. Don’t use relations as categories. They need to be directly related to each other. Tagging a common operator= is enough here.

landuse=residential + residential= may possibly be used if they form a single entity in proximity, for example named “ABC Student Village”.

4

Ah okay great, thanks guys. I also found this page on the wiki (linked from the sites page) that seems like it’s a pretty strong mark in favor of just deleting the relation (and adding other tags): https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Relations_are_not_Categories.