The Net’s Most Wanteds

Landlords and rehabbers take notice – you may soon be focused on the new concepts of “Virtual Real Estate Investing“. There are many variations on what this term means, encompassing everything from using the internet to aid in real estate investing efforts to participating in online games such as SecondLife.

To find out the real story, I had a conversation with Bryan Ellis, widely considered to be one of the originators of the concept of Virtual Real Estate Investing.

When I began using the term virtual real estate investing in the late 1990s, I did so because I saw clear parallels between the strategies used for profiting from physical real estate and those that would create income in the online world, said Ellis.

One example of the parallels between virtual and physical real estate Bryan Ellis cites is the similarity between the monetization of domain names versus physical property. “There’s a huge difference between a website and a piece of real estate, but the ways you can profit from them are similar: ‘flipping’, rental/leasing, advertising sales, etc…all of these apply to both markets” he states.

The similarities really are obvious. Consider this: If you own a piece of real estate in a desirable neighborhood, your real estate has value because other people are interested in that location. Likewise, if you own a desirable domain name, others will find value in it because it serves their purposes. Regardless of the type of asset, you can sell or lease or use any number of strategies to turn the assets into cash.

In our next installment of this series on virtual real estate investing, Bryan Ellis will share the internet analogies to the physical concept of real estate development.