With Valentine day over I was right back at it, but now I was more prepared for the week ahead, ok, less of a newbie anyways so armed with more research on the web and more frantic panic sells from my Crypto wallet (don't worry I have many) I had some additional funds to play with. And what might have triggered my passion for this game more was that on February 15 @ 10:14 PM GMT I sold my first house for 3,500 UPX which does not seem much but at a markup of 379% I didn't rip the buyer off he or she brought it on their own choice. They had the tools available to them to make that decision and had their reasons to do so (for example to obtain a set of houses in the same street for a multiplier) or liked the area knowing it was a good investment. And that's the joys of playing this game, it's all about taking a risks and cashing in on your success although for me it's about the journey and I hoping I don't get a divorce at the end of it!
BUILDINGS IN UPLAND
Think I just sweeten the sale with a 3D building that was on my plot of land (hopefully this feature will be in the game permanently in the future as it's only a temporary thing right now ). You see in Upland you can build buildings or cool things such as robots and even planets on your land. Land that is based in UP2 so a larger area means hopefully bigger and better buildings that you can make. Though there is another complex thing called a Spark token to use as SPUD units as currency to build these buildings/artifacts and are takes time to build though you can reduce the time by spending UPX against the clock, confused...good so am I!
HARLEM COLLECTION
I won't bore people with all my property transactions I do in Upland (plus I would give away my secrets/strategies!) but will mention how things work in the game that I want to share, you see even though you can zoom in and around the City, there are three locations around the world you can travel to, and like in life you have to travel to get there. You start in San Fransico and from there you can take the train to Fresno, no seriously you have to send your avatar/explorer to the train station and from there buy a ticket to Fresno (link to some of my properties there) for of course a small fee (50 UPX) and you get this cool cartoon animation/image of the train journey with travel time to get there which I found fun and it adds to the immersion of things.
However, a trip from San Fransisco to New York requires a plane ticket and for you to travel to the Airport and the cost of that ticket is 2,580 UPX plus flight time of 42 minutes, and while this does not sound long TRUST me it is long as that weekend I was flying I believe a new collection opened up in New York (Or I could have imagined it, this past week is a blur!) was Harlem and you had to get 3 properties in that area to qualify for a bonus 1.57x on your monthly income. So it was a mad dash to get over there to discover new plots of land ready to be minted, as with anything in life, you snooze you lose!! that's my motto when it comes to investments... I JUST have to have it... and even more so if I can make money from it.
I was NOT going to fall into the same trap as I did with Sea Cliff and paid over the market price for the property so this means minting the area yourself and sending your explorer in that general direction to change a grid from white over to a grid in light green on the map, this simple visual help you zone in on the house or plot. But I was not the first, so many other plots were gone, but to my surprise, there were some good areas still left so I minted one for 42,868 UPX on 16th of February @ 13:41, and then at 18:23 the same day I minted another for 61,950 UPX, then I just only needed one more property to active that bonus since without getting a set you DO NOT get the bonus multiplier on your property.
But options were slim I only had a small budget... OK, I always have a small budget! so I was desperate to activate the bonus and I chose to break my own rule and brought the third property for 175% markup from another player for 19,110 UPX, FAB I had my collection YEAH! but wait! I then saw a massive plot of land over 581 UP2 with monthly earnings of 1,756.94 UPX, that's the largest amount of earnings I could potentially own (this is SMALL FRY compared to what is out there by the way) but wait, this was only the base income with bonus multiplier I could get a whopping 2,758.4 UPX per month. Yup, you guessed it, even though I now had completed my set and achieved my goal for the evening, I still went over to the area and minted the fourth property in Harlem for 122,010 UPX which is the most I've ever spent so far in this game for one single property, but I have no regrets, loving New York as well just check out my portfolio here.
HOW MUCH DID THIS GUY SPEND ON A PROPERTY?
You won't get any great deals in well-established areas, places that are listed as hot sites based on the collection set like the Financial District, Crooked Lombard, and Iconic SF in San Francisco or Time square and Wall ST collection in New York as they have fantastic multipliers. Oh, did you hear about a player - RYANMIANO minted/brought the location where real-life NYSE exchange resides for a cool $23,000 that's 23,000,000 UPX on the 28th of December 2020 that property alone generates 927,360.06 UPX a month in gains with the multiplier!
GRABBING A DEAL
Important firstly to get properties in a Collection set but secondarily do NOT pay if possible over the odds for a property. To do this either mint the property yourself or you can actually find players selling then under 100% odd I know but they have their reasons, and at the end of the day it's all a gamble to see whether or not a property would be a good investment or not.
On February 18 @ 21:00 I found four properties undervalued of around 92% of markup and best of all they are the exact number AND location to fall under the Pacific Heights Collection in San Francisco with a cool 1.8x multiplier on the monthly return. So here I grabbed a bargain and I do hope there are many like these around, but as I sink more hours into this game I start to find these are quite rare and hot spots have already sold out or people are selling their plots for silly amounts of markups from their original price. The game allows you to do max UPX on one property and that's 99,999,999 UPX so BEWARE if you do NOT have phone authentication set on your mobile phone and you are drunk playing late at night, you could easily accidentally spend $99k, and have to explain to [email protected] that you really didn't really want to pay that much for that 1 bedroom flat in Fresno, CA.
