The Father Of Virtual Real Estate Investing Comments On His Industry
“Virtual Real Estate Investing” is a relatively new concept. Everything from using the internet as an avenue to make more money in real estate to online games such as SecondLife seem to be included in the popular definition of this term.
To find out the real story, I had a conversation with Bryan Ellis of BryanEllis.com, 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. He points out that control of a domain name or even a specific web page is much like controlling a real estate property ” those assets can be monetized in similar ways: By selling them for a profit, by leasing them, by offering advertising, etc.
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. 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.
