enkumber: Real estate in Second Life

enkumber: Real estate in Second Life

I currently own two SIMS in Second Life. Today I ordered another one since i had succes with the first two. My business is simple : buy the sim, terraform it, divide it in parcels and rent it. I earn around 200$ monthly from every SIM. A SIM costs 1675 USD currently so you got your money back in 8-9 months. Not bad at all. An important thing in Second Life is the tier, you pay it anyway, you own the land - you pay tier, you rent the land - the tier is included in it.
The monthly tier for a private SIM is USD 295 . I earn from my tenants about $500 . I pay the tier to linden lab and the profit is just USD 200. It's a little frustrating but hey, at a large scale this is a good business.

However, this is not the only type of real estate business in Second Life. Some people are selling the parcels from their SIMS and charge a smaller tier than me. Selling the land will get you back the money you invested in the SIM in 1-2 weeks. And ... with that you can buy another SIM.

Considering this, I was wondering today how its better on long term. I found out that its better to sell for short term. Virtually, selling the land will get you money to buy SIM after SIM. However, after a number of SIMS you'll find hard to manage them all. If you are alone in this business will be hard and maybe you will need to consider to rent your land.

That's it for now ... I'll write again about Second Life, maybe about commercial land vs. residential land.

For those who don't know what Second Life is, it's basically an MMO, similar to an RPG except not. You basically can do anything you want in Second Life as long as you write you own code. Over the past year or so, I have read about how people have written code to have sex, rob banks, guns. Hell they even created a Nuclear Bomb and nuked the place. People have also bought Second Life money with real money, people have sold their codes, and as enkumber has written, sold real estate.

Quite a cool business to be running. But it does raise some questions. Who would buy this kind of stuff. Who would rent it? Maybe there's alot of things I don't know about, but I definitely think it's pointless to own a piece of land on the internet.
However, this all changes when you find the possibility of earning money from all of this. Which leads us to question, who do you buy this land from? wouldn't land eventually run out? If people are buying land and reselling/renting it. Why don't other people do it as well?

In the end I guess it's personal opinion: Do I really need a piece of land on the internet? My answer is no.