Answers
How is virtual land valued?
The answer
By the three methods used for physical land, minus the ground: comparable parcel sales, the income a developed parcel earns from tenants and events, and location — adjacency to the traffic a world actually has. Where footfall and lease income cannot be evidenced, only the comparable method survives, and it prices sentiment rather than cash flow.
The income approach is the one that separates an asset from an artefact. A parcel with contracted tenants, scheduled events, and measurable visitors can be underwritten on what it earns; a parcel without them is valued against other parcels, which is a circular exercise in a falling market. The comparable method is not wrong, but it is the weakest of the three, and in this segment it was the only one most buyers ever applied.
Diligence turns on three questions a seller rarely volunteers: whether the world's operator can mint more land and under what governance, whether traffic is verified or self-reported, and whether tenant arrangements are contracts or announcements. GDA's experience assembling an estate and selling the company that held it to a listed buyer is that all three must answer well before an institutional counterparty will transact.