• Business 2.0 Magazine, Tuesday, April 3, 2007 10:46 AM

The online real estate business, which refers to the sale of virtual property on the Web (think Second Life), is a bit of a booming market these days; Business 2.0 Magazine explores whether or not this is for good reason. If you're a real estate baron in a virtual world like Second Life, you can carve out some money leasing or selling land. But nowadays, the virtual real estate market is expanding beyond the limited audiences of online communities and into the Web at large.

A company called Weblo makes money by selling real estate pages that represent real-world cities. As company CEO Rocky Mirza sees it, the pages are supposed to become mini-travel guides to the locations they represent--but so far, there is very little content on Weblo. Owners expect that traffic and ad revenue will both become significant in the near future as more content is added.

For example, there's a Weblo page for the Empire State Building that was recently bought for $1, which the owner later flipped for $250; a virtual page for the city of Seattle was eventually bought by a real estate loan analyst for $2,000; California was recently sold to a lawyer for $53,000. In total, Weblo has attracted some 10,000 speculators to its virtual city sites. Mirza calls the project "Monopoly on steroids," and says he expects to earn $10 million this year. A lot of money, sure, but the question "what in the world is any of this good for" begs asking. What value is there in "owning" an Empire State building page? If consumers want information about the landmark, can't they just go to Wikipedia?

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