Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010, and the state of the virtual real estate market on Second Life and Weblo, including prices, brokers and turnover, refers to that time.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of virtual real estate, but what started out as a game in which you could invest a couple of dollars has turned into big business.
There are two websites where you can invest in this kind of virtual real estate. The first is Second Life, where a person can buy a property, a plot of land or an island (in 3D), improve it, add buildings, renovate it and then sell it as if it were a real transaction.
Unlike Second Life, there is another website called Weblo, where purchases are made on pages that show real properties, and its turnover is just as surprising as that of Second Life.
It works like this: you buy a plot of land or a property for 1 or 2 dollars and gradually add extras. Let’s say that whoever joins this game becomes a virtual speculator who, these days, is also a speculator in the real world, because that property will be bought by another virtual buyer who wants to do business in the same way you do.
This real estate game has become such a profitable business that the first virtual brokers and estate agencies have already appeared, trading these properties as if they met a real need.
One American bought a virtual plot of building land for just 5 dollars and, a year later, after investing another 50 dollars, managed to sell it for the frivolous sum of 3 million dollars. There is talk of individual deals worth as much as 100 million dollars.
I appreciate new technologies and the business opportunities the internet offers us, but this kind of investment makes me wonder whether the world is really going mad 🙂
Further reading
- Business ideas related to tourism
- Business ideas in services for companies
- How to find business ideas
- Profitable businesses as an alternative to real estate
Featured image: ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
