1. A method, comprising: for an object associated with a virtual area that supports establishment of respective presences of communicants operating respective client network nodes, maintaining an object record associated with the object and comprising one or more property fields storing respective values defining properties of the object; based on a communicant-requested modification of one or more of the properties of the object, updating the values of corresponding ones of the property fields of the object record to reflect the communicant-requested modification; sending a specification of the one or more updated property field values to each of the client network nodes being operated by a respective one of the communicants who is present in the virtual area.