'Real' Estate Sale

Mirza, who grew up playing Monopoly and collecting baseball cards, said Weblo taps into the idea that there's value in collecting things that other people can't get. In real life, the Statue of Liberty or the Bellagio Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip are unavailable or out of reach. But on Weblo, these are properties that can be bought and turned into real moneymakers.

"This is about supply and demand," Mirza said. "There's only one Washington, D.C., and every person associated with it could be interested in it."

The site's investor said the idea built on the popularity of online games, but caters to mainstream interests.

"Weblo represents a more interesting play that's part fantasy and partly rooted in the real world," said Geoff Mott, managing director of VantagePoint, based in Montreal. "It gives participants the opportunity to really develop value in what they're doing online. You don't have to be a gamer. You can be just a regular person."

Weblo has yet to prove that it will attract mainstream interest. Its membership still pales in comparison to the 8 million "residents" of Second Life, a four-year-old site where people establish virtual characters that can hang out and chat online. Second Life later became popular with businesses that launched virtual offices and held virtual events in that world. But because Second Life communities are largely based on fantasy, there's no human or emotional connection to the locations.

Weblo, by contrast, is based on real locations, and because people have emotional connections to Weblo properties -- a hometown or a house where a grandparent was born, for example -- the site could generate interest, said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Silicon Valley research firm Creative Strategies.

"There's no question that it has potential," he said. "But it's way too early to tell if it will be successful."

Some are already reaping rewards from their Weblo investments. Las Vegas, for example, sold initially for $36 in September, resold for $430 in December and was purchased by its current owner for $2,300 in March of this year. Six states are also on the resale market, with asking prices that range from $2,800 for North Dakota to Florida's whopping $1.8 million.

The Weblo business model works using an extensive -- and somewhat complicated -- revenue-sharing formula.

The state of California, for example, sold in September for $53,000. The owner, called the governor, made money when the city of San Francisco was purchased for $52.31.

Both the governor and the San Francisco mayor stand to make money if, for example, another member buys a specific address in the Mission district of San Francisco and opens a T-shirt shop. The shop owner, in turn, makes money through sales of real T-shirts sold off his or her personalized e-commerce site, and also shares advertising revenue from the site with the mayor and the governor.

Weblo offers free and paid memberships but collects a greater percentage of advertising revenue from its nonpaying members.

Transactions in Weblo's world are largely not subject to real-world laws.

Weblo does not report members' revenue for the purposes of taxation. Copyright law -- when members attach real brand names to a virtual address, for example -- is only enforced if the copyright holder complains about violations.

Like other Web sites and social networks, Weblo and its members depend on visitors who are willing to spend time in this virtual world and interact with others.

"The experiment here is whether it can empower a lot of individuals to build Web sites," Mott said. "Is that a sustainable model? If it is, then Weblo is enabling a vast army of contributors to the Web, and that could turn it into a valuable property."