So how exactly do I become a realtor?

any info appreciated

Very easily....

1) Tier WAY up, and expect to not turn a true profit for at least a couple of months
2) Start buying land in auctions.
3) Resell that land with a markup

Simple..

Now be warned that you may have to hold as much as 2 or 3 sims worth of land at a time, and also make sure that you can sell enough to pay for both your tier (possibly up as much as or more then $600usd monthly, and to pay off your auction costs. Not to mention the occasional neg rate, or forum bashing.

- Sam

It's hard to expect any profit until you have a larger volume and you have to constantly work hard to follow the auctions, make the right bid with your margins, sell quickly before tier bills hit, lather, rinse, repeat.

But in order to get a feel for it you should just start with one piece, I'd recommend 8192 which is only $75/tier and see if you can buy and sell that, parcel it, sell it, see if you can clear it and do that a few times to see how margins work and how the GOM rates are running.

My own feeling is you should start smaller and work up as you go and see if you clear a profit after costs -- it is very hard to sit there with land on your tier going nowhere.

You forgot the rest of the steps

4) Watch land next to idiot-builds sit unsold for weeks
5) Twiddle your thumbs while buyers can't log in
6) Sell land below cost in order to tier back down out of anger and frustration
7) Figure out some OTHER way to have fun

Buster

I've been wondering about the start-up strategy myself, not that I intend to actually pursue it. Let's try building a very simple, VERY idealized model around the advice that you start with an 8192m tier and see if some experienced realtors come in and gnaw holes in it

Right now, you can sell $1000L for $3.35 USD, or move a block of $5000 for $19.50 USD. So, let's split the difference and say that the current stable price per 1kL block is $3.62.

That gives us a L:USD exchange rate of 276.24:1.

Looking at the auction history for 8192m plats, there are 3 USD amounts being reported: $170.00, $144.00, and $150.00. So based on that (way too anemic) dataset, we'll say that the average winning bid for an 8192m sim is going to be $154.67 USD

So to purchase your first sim, you'll spend $75 tier + 154.67 bid, or $229.67. That's 63,444 Lindens. If you want to work only with those initial USD expenditures, you'd have to sell 100% of the land at $7.74L / m, average just to break even. No Linden pennies, so you'll have to cover the fractional part by the price differences between the more and less desirable plots you carve out. Hmmm...trying to make a profit on a single cycle of your tier is probably not going to work.

If you assume that you can cycle your tier completely twice in a single billing period, and you distribute your tier cost over both rounds, you hit the first leg of your break-even point on the first buy at $192.17 USD, or 53,085L, or 6.48L / m. But you've done a 50-50 split between your two purchases to cover your sunk costs on tier fees, so you have to repeat the pricing strategy on the second round just to break even.

This sketch has some pretty glaring holes in it....like the fact that you wouldn't have to sell out the first purchase before starting Phase II; rather, you could bid on smaller plots piecemeal and start moving them...and, of course, the fact that you really can't count on selling out at all. OTOH, you may score a really scenic 8192 that you sell to an upscale player at 60,000L in one fell swoop...but I just glanced at some of the land listings, and I didn't see undeveloped chunks that size moving in that price range. I saw a few lots + established clubs/businesses/whatever with that kind of price tag, but are you willing to develop your holdings?

Bottom line, it sure looks like to me you're going to have to get all the way into your third tier cycle, if not your fourth, before you can start thinking about making a profit at the end of the month....if you're going to price anywhere near competitively. All within 30 days. Under perfect circumstances, it looks like there would be a nominal profit on your third cycle, and a profit worth thinking about (from a hobbyist's standpoint) on the fourth.

Ah, I'm so inexperienced at this myself, and I'm too tired to think about it any more tonight. I'll be over on the sidelines, taking bets on how long this whole string of half-assed conjectures lasts before somebody with actual experience just strolls by and torches it

-- jj

The GOM price is more like $4.00. People endlessly talk about this, because it differs on IGE or elsewhere, and the $4.00 on GOM doesn't reflect PayPal and commissions but those are the prices of coming to the table anyway.

The fact is, you can make money off 2 cycles in one 30 day period, but it requires ensuring when you bid that you have some really fail-safe properties that you can get at say, $5-6 per meter on the auction and can sell at $8-$9 inworld. What happens is you try to get the prime waterfront marked and sold for $9 or more and then drop to $8 if you have to, and then move the other pieces behind for a bit less if you have to. So many factors come into play -- other people in the sim, distance to telehub -- it is a total crapshoot. But you can get lucky and sell of pretty well in that first whack.

Next comes the grittier second cycle. Now you might wind up with Purina. I see some land I once bought at the auction has changed hands among land dealers 3-4-6 times and is still not with an end-user, and sitting on a sim. It just doesn't sell ever, and flops back and forth between land dealers.

Here you might sell off a few plots, then the rest you might have to eat and sell for less because you simply have to get out of that tier straight-jacket in 30 days, either dump it off the account or start the whole crazy cycle again.

So in the end, you might be left with like $17.42 profit or something, or maybe $70 in profit depending on it all goes.

8192 can go for $65000 even if it's in the right place and time.

This my limited experience. I don't think you can make money off auction dealing and wholesaling without huge amounts of reserve cash, patience, determination, wider amounts of tiering up available to you, luck, and no game patches.

Don't try this when they are about to do a patch.