The company is the latest corporate name to develop a parallel shopping process in Second Life, the digital archipelago developed by Linden Labs.

The Parsippany, N.Y.-based division of Cendant Corp. has created a digital reproduction of an actual new home built on Mercer Island, Wash., currently listed for sale by Coldwell Banker Bain. The company is showing the virtual version of the $3.1 million house to prospective buyers in Second Life.

The way it works is that avatars--people's virtual proxies in Second Life--who make appointments to view the house can walk through each room of the 5,702-square-foot gated home and use touchpoints to click through to coldwellbanker.com, where they can engage a real Coldwell Banker Bain sales associate.

Users can visit coldwellbankervirtualhome.com for immediate access to the "real world" home and to Second Life.

The company, which in March became the latest in a raft of firms marketing in Second Life, says it has had over 160,000 visitors in four months to its "in-world" headquarters, an edifice complete with helicopter. The company says visitors spend an average of seven minutes interacting with the brand.

Charlie Young, senior vice president/marketing, says the company's move is a first. "We are doing it for several reasons, he says. "The first is that our reception in Second Life has been very positive, so it made sense to continue learning about how 3D can work in the real-estate world. It also allows us to connect with a tech-savvy consumer while establishing the brand with them."

He says consumers can learn about the house via publicity efforts both in-world and out-of-world. "There's a lot of blogging about the home, and there are reporters visiting the home. We had previously used the in-world advertising network to advertise the initial phase of our involvement, which was the 500 homes available for avatars."

Coldwell Banker's initial investment included the headquarters and 500 homes available for sale in the Ranchero section of the Second Life mainland. "We had been looking at Second Life for a year, as many have been doing, and the decision was not to do it unless we could add to the user experience," says Young. He says that the company then learned that land barons--real people hoarding virtual land--had begun artificially raising the price of "land" in Second Life. People buy land with real dollars converted to Lindens.

That, he says, offered the company an opportunity to leverage its brand equity: the company was founded in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake as a response to land barons jacking up land prices.

He says the company bought the 500 properties from land barons in Second Life for $100 and offered them for sale, with furnished houses, for $20 to $30 Linden dollars.

The real house, whose virtual reproduction is being shown now in Second Life, came from Coldwell Banker Bain, a Seattle affiliate, which chose the house because it didn't have a regionally specific design. "We picked Seattle because the technology is accepted there, and because that's where so much of 'Silicon Valley' has migrated to," says a company rep.

The company replicated the house down to the branding on appliances, hardwood floor and even the view from different windows.

Young says the company hasn't committed to offering more virtual walk-throughs of real properties in Second Life. "No one has a crystal ball to know when the proliferation of 3D will hit, but we imagine within five years it will be a relatively useful tool."

Emily Riley, an analyst at Jupiter Research, says marketing in Second Life doesn't keep people out of Second Life--people turned off by marketing in general, that is--and that it works best when it involves personalization.

"I think what you find is that [marketing by real companies] is easy to just bypass--so ineffective marketing efforts will simply not generate much interest or traffic." She adds that Linden Labs doesn't charge advertisers at all, beyond the purchase of virtual land--which she says, at this point, is around the size of Rhode Island, all told.

"A big portion of what creates commerce around Second Life has to do with creating a persona. Also, if you own land, it involves what you put on that land--are you going to make a restaurant, a bar, a house--and services around dating and entertainment."

She adds that there are "anecdotal examples" of marketers using Second Life to exploit the real world, à la Coldwell Banker. "Adidas had a shoe island where you could design and wear virtual shoes but also design it offline, too. Linden Labs says tens of thousands of consumers did that."

As for similar efforts with real land and real houses? "It's going to be a small percentage because if you think about people who look to buy houses in the real world, it's a small percentage of the population at any given time. If you apply that to Second Life, you are talking to a small audience."

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