What is "Surreal Estate"?

"Surreal Estate" is a phrase that employs a substitution of the word "surreal" for the word "real" in the phrase "real estate."

Surreal (adjective) -
having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic

Real Estate (noun) -
1. property, especially in land: three acres of real estate.
2. real property.

The term "surreal estate" refers to property that exists in the virtual world (a.k.a. cyberspace), that which is "unreal" or "incorporeal" in nature, as opposed to "real" property that exists in the corporeal world. The earliest usage of the term was as the title of the 1976 film "Surreal Estate" (originally titled "Sérail") by Eduardo de Gregorio, which pre-dates the World Wide Web. The second occurence of the term is credited to Transit Gloria Media, LLC, a Minnesota-based, online marketing firm, which appropriated the term in 1997 to use it to refer to property that exists on the World Wide Web (e.g. domains, websites, expanses of cyberspace) through SURREALestate.com.

Example 1: Facebook.com is a prime piece of surreal estate.

Example 2: I have retained the services of a surreal estate agent to help me sell my website for a huge profit.

Example 3: I am a surreal estate broker in Second Life.