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This article is a part of "The ABC of Getting Rich" article series. The articles so far in the series:

Prologue
Monetary market, part 1/2
Monetary market, part 2/2

When you gain more wealth, new business possibilities open up. In this article, house market and loans are covered. These areas share some crucial characteristics: you will need to donate gold and/or properties via donate function. In doing this, you're taking a definite risk, because you'll either need to fully trust the person you're making the deal with or make a proper contract. House market and granting loans are perhaps a bit tiresome in a long run, so you might do well to use them as augmenting your other business methods.

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House market

In the game, houses are indestructible and everyone needs only one - the higher quality, the better, of course. Houses can be donated to other players, so this opens up the possibility to "upgrade" your house by selling the older one. This opens up a possibility for business: buy old houses from players who don't need them and sell them to those in need.

The trick here is to find the customers. This takes easily quite some time and effort at least in the beginning, until you get some contacts and/or reputation. You need to know both beginners and experienced players.

Pricing is obviously a deciding factor. I could list here some prices, but they'd most likely differ from the market values by the time the article is published and because I mostly do these kind of deals to augment my other income. Because of this, as a rule of thumb I only buy houses which I know I'll be able to sell in a couple of days. Someone focusing more on house business probably can afford to buy more expensive houses and sell them with less profit, because of the larger volume. For instance, I'd go for a profit minimum of 0.1-0.2g for Q1 houses, 0.3-0.4g for Q2 houses and so on.

A lot of businessmen tend to spam the media in each country with "special offers". You'll probably get better results by selling directly to those who need the houses, without getting the bad reputation.


There are a lot of houses for sale, but the prices are at times way too optimistic.

Where to find these buyers and sellers, then?
A surefire place is the Other announcements -section of the forums in the game. The offers in there are often rather poor, but sometimes you can find cheap stuff for sale. Be quick, but be wary - something that sounds too good to be true probably is too good to be true. More on this later.
Other sensible places are different country forums and their IRC channels. Especially take note of countries, which have experienced a babyboom lately. It's usually easier to find buyers for low quality houses. Countries with an older population usually tend to have houses for sale cheaper than others.
Also note different kind of IRC trade channels (the bottom of the page), they're usually worth checking out.

Before you engage in housing business, do a contract unless the other party won't give his money or house to you first. More on this at the bottom of the article.

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Loans

When you have money and someone else needs it, it's easy to come up with the conclusion to loan money with proper interest. The idea is good, but hastily issued loans spell trouble. With the following procedures you can still get good results.


Debt can be crushing. Take good care to keep yourself covered.

-Discuss what the loan is for. Beginners often need a loan to start a new company, but either may not have enough experience to run the companies or drastically overestimate the profits available. E.g. granting a loan to a company for an export license can be a good idea, since you can calculate yourself how much profit it'll make.
-Find out how your client is going to pay back, how reliable he is and whether he has some possible collaterals. Check his background, don't give out loans to players who've played only very little time.
-Negotiate about the interest and payback time.
-Think whether you can achieve a profit better by using the money elsewhere. Forget about the loans if you think you can do better, or suggest a better interest rate.
-Consider the big picture - are you ready to invest the needed sum for a few weeks, possibly a month or even two? Even in a couple of weeks, new investment possibilities may open. On the other hand, once you've granted the loan, you only need to make sure you get your money back.

If you end up granting the loan, do a contract unless you know your client to be truly trustworthy.

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Contract

eRepublik is filled with all sorts of cheaters and scammers, who do anything to get their hands on your money. This is why the game has a "working" contracts section, in which the admins enforce contracts done correctly.

It's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to double-check the contract so that it follows the rules set by the admins. I've seen a lot of contracts fail on small details, e.g. if it has not been determined what happens if one party of the contract dies during the contract time.


A contract is valid only after signing it

If the contract example is not good for your use and you hesitate whether your contract is valid or not, try to search the contracts forum for examples that cover the areas you're unsure about, or for ones in which the admins have replied. Contracts that have gone through a trial are good examples - they can usually be found by reading those contracts with more than 5-6 replies. The admins usually react very slow and sometimes you'll need to wait for a response from them for a very long time, e.g. in this case three months.

As stated in the rules, both parties need to accept the contract by quoting the whole text in its entirety and by writing below the text "I agree with the Contract terms". Only after both parties have done so, the contract becomes valid. It may even be a good idea to take a screenshot of what the other party has replied. Read his reply thoroughly - the contract is not valid if he has e.g. written "I don't agree with the Contract terms". Do not transfer any possessions before this!

Then again, if you're good at creating contracts, you could even start selling contract templates! Alternatively, you could write more complex contracts for a fee - not everyone in this game knows English good enough to write their own ones.

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Conclusion

It's always worth keeping your eyes open, even if you're not going to do active house business. Money is always money. I don't usually think too much of loans because of the long time of investment and the interest isn't often too good, but if you're e.g. having a small pause in playing the game and only wish to do the work-train routine, perhaps your money is in better use by someone else. But when you compare the daily profit with e.g. monetary market presented in the previous example, loans usually pale in comparison. Loans of a couple of weeks are quite OK, a month's loan is not bad, but beyond one month I'd only grant loans for some rather special deals. However, to each his own - I know people who've made quite some profit by just granting loans and I've had some good experiences with loans to companies as well.

As said in the beginning, this article deals mostly about part-time business - money can be made when you find the right opportunities, but larger profits need a lot of time and effort. The next article about buying and selling companies will be more suitable for "full time" profit making. Stay tuned!