Investing In The Physical Or Virtual Real Estate World with Bryan Ellis
Landlords and rehabbers take notice - you may soon be focused on the new concepts of “Virtual Real Estate Investing“. 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.
In order to figure out the truth of the matter, I sought out Bryan Ellis, whose experience in the fledgling industry is truly impressive.
Ellis says he adopted the term “virtual real estate investing” sometime before Y2K after he realized that making money online is conceptually very similar to making money with physical real estate.
Bryan Ellis cites the similar strategies one can employe to make money from “virtual property” and “physical property” as a primary parallel of the two markets. 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.
I must admit: Its easy to see the parallels. 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.
