In Approval

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.

An example of the similar nature of “virtual” and “physical” real estate Bryan Ellis likes to point out is the methods of making a profit from domain names compared to physical real estate. “These types of assets – websites and physical real estate – can be monetized in very similar ways like buy lo/sell high, leasing/rental and advertising opportunities” he says.

The similarities really are obvious. For example, if you’re the owner of a desirable property, its desirability is (in a business context) largely due to its being in a location that is of interest to others. Similarly, ownership of a desirable domain name is valuable for the same reasons. So it doesn’t matter if you own physical real estate or virtual real estate – you’ll likely use similar strategies to turn them into money in your pocket.

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.