Avination is a UK based replica of the now famous Second Life virtual world platform that has been in operation for just over a year now. While the basic format of the platform is the same as the original, the pricing scheme is very different. In addition, the fact that there is less than 1,000 sims currently online and maybe 150 people online on this platform at one time, means now is the time to get on the ground floor for the chance to actually make real money in Avination. Today we are looking at basic land sales and rentals.
Contrary to Second Life, Avination has now “Mainland” areas. This means that all the land available for use in this platform is developed by individual owners. When a parcel of land is “sold” to a tenant, the tenant does not truly own that land free and clear. If the tenant fails to pay the tier to the sim owner, they can easily reclaim the land and evict that tenant.
A “Sim” as it is referred to be a virtual landmass of 65,536 square meters surrounded by water (unless there is another sim attached to it). The current price that a sim owner pays to the Avination Virtual Limited it $60USD per month, this equates to 15,000 C$ which is the currency used in-world. Just for reference the USD to C$ exchange rate is $0.004USD to 1C$. Most people that would want to have an entire sim in this world would simply go buy a new one on their own as there is currently no setup fees associated with doing so. From the viewpoint on an investor, making money on land rental in Avination, is all based on parcel division.
The most common form of sim parceling in the virtual world is the 16 parcel split. In this case the sim is equally divided into 16 parcels each becoming a square of 4096 square meters with 937 available prims. Prims are the building blocks that make everything present inside virtual worlds. The size of a parcel determines the prims available to use. If you split your sim into 16 parcels your monthly cost per parcel is $3.75USD or about C$937. Most investors take this amount multiply it by 12 months and divide that cost by 52 weeks to find out their breakeven point for rental rates. In this case the weekly cost to the sim owner for this parcel is $0.87USD or C$217. In order to make a profit from this investment as a rental, the sim owner needs to charge more than C$217 per week for this parcel.
Another key thought used in this business is that the smaller the parcel, the higher the percentage based markup on the rental rate. For example, if the sim was only divided into two equal pieces, the renal markup could be far less than if it was split into 64 parcels as the sim is more likely to be fully rented out and could more easily guarantee the investor an income with less work to maintain.
Going back to our 16 parcel sim — I would recommend that a fair rental rate for this sized parcel would be about 1.5 times the weekly cost. That would make the rental rate for each parcel C$350 per week (based on the monthly cost of C$937/4*1.5). You could also go the monthly route and save the tenants some money by charging C$1400 (this saves them four weeks rent over the year).
This same math applies regardless of the parcel size, the only difference is the parcel size, prim counts, and suggested rental markups. The following is a list of typical parcel sizes, prims, and suggested rental markups:
Parcel Size Prims Markup Rate
32768sqm 7500 1.25
16384sqm 3750 1.30
8192sqm 1875 1.40
4096sqm 937 1.50
2048sqm 468 1.75
1024sqm 234 2.00
With the cost of sims in Avination being so cheap, the renting of one sim will not put you into financial retirement, but if you had 10-20 of these going in the coming months, you could pay your utility bills or even your rent in real life. So why not take a look into it? Getting A 50% ROI on something like this is rather good and could put an extra $30USD in your pocket each month per sim and having 20 sims could make a $600 difference in your life.