Pittsburgh Homes Daily

This is my submission to the Carnival of Real Estate hosted by Brownstoner.  I had planned a more conservative article about architecture in Pittsburgh in honor of Brooklyn’s brownstones, but I’ve decided to use this forum instead to welcome thoughts from everyone as I think out loud.

I was quite surprised when reading Peter Coy’s Hot Property post this week, at least the ‘virtual’ real estate market is booming. 

First, I’d never heard of Entropia University or Second Life.  I guess that must mean that I’m getting older or something.

Second, when I read the title, I expected the post to be about the virtual real estate market that really is booming: the internet.

The battle for “space” on the internet is occuring everywhere.  Google, Yahoo, MSN, and a host of other search engines are battling to be the search engine of choice for the internet.  What is that piece of real estate worth?  I don’t know: Zillow doesn’t extend to domains …. yet!

Although I imagine that the property holdings of these search engines would be pretty massive if they were in a “physical” plane, there are a host of other companies that are seeking to bulldoze the empire built by the search engines through tagging and social bookmarking, like technorati and digg. 

On a “smaller” level, the battle to be the top search result in Google, the first page of Digg, or garner a link from Lifehacker, is “worth” a lot of money.  For those that need a visual image: If Google is the New York of the internet, then being on page 1 for a popular search term on Google is like owning a penthouse in New York City.  On second thought, I guess it is more like leasing the penthouse, since you could be kicked out at any time by a change in the algorithm.

On the internet these days, even undeveloped property can be extremely valuable.  What is a *.com name worth these days?  Does it matter that the only difference between *.org, *.biz, *.info, and *.com is that *.com was first and is now best known?  Or is a *.com like waterfront property in the physical representation of the internet?  It had better be, with domain names like shop.com selling in the millions of dollars.

What is it worth to have 100 million “friends” on Myspace?  To have a subscriber to your RSS feed?  To own a webpage with a bunch of links and no real content?  I’m not sure, but I look at the stories of The Million Dollar Homepage, 500words, and one red paperclip and I wonder.

You’ll have to excuse me for my long-winded preamble: here are my preliminary thoughts organized as best as I could.

First, the internet is undergoing a tremendous expansion at the present time.  From spam to blogs to individual company websites, to made for adsense pages.  The “real world” is more organized.  Properties are organized into municipalities, which are organized into states or regions, which are combined into countries, which are led by governments.  Governments monitor property sales and police the territories.  What will happen to the online realm?  Consolidation?  A dewey decimal system of organization?  Or are we willing to let Google be the police force, handing out pagerank and search engine rankings to those that it sees fit?

Second, what will happen to the online real estate world?  Is there space for the real estate web technology that has popped up recently?  Will several groups consolidate to lead an organized revolt against Realtor.com?  Or is Realtor.com now an unstoppable online force, controlling the number one rank for real estate in both Google and Yahoo, such that others are just fighting for the scraps at the table.  What would it take to overthrow the trademarked one?

What role do the real estate blogs that have sprung up have in this game?  Are they a marketing tool?  A source of revenue?  A hobby and networking tool?  All of the above? 

And finally, although I have never “played” Entropia University or Second Life, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out someday that someone figures out a way to turn their online “virtual” fortune into a real fortune.