Real Estate Simulator Review – Early Access Impressions

Real Estate Simulator comes out on March 22nd, but is it worth your money? Read our complete review to learn more.

The idea of building your real estate empire from scratch and going from rags to riches sounds like a dream come true for any simulation game enthusiast. But will Real Estate Simulator actually deliver on that promise?

We took the game for a spin to find out if it’s worth your hard-earned cash.

A Promising Start

Real Estate Simulator puts you in the shoes of a budding real estate agent and lets you build your empire from scratch. It’s a new concept for a simulator game, and we went in with pretty high hopes.

You start with a small basement office, a computer, and not much else. The game has three Levels: slums, Suburbs, and Cities. When you start out, you only get access to the properties in the Slums.

The loop is simple – you go to the location, buy a property by negotiating with the owner, add some furniture, add a listing from your office, and sell it at a profit. As you keep selling more and more properties, you gain experience unlocking the properties Suburb and City. They cost more to buy, but you can also sell them for a significantly higher profit margin.

The Early Hours

Though the idea is promising, what put us off about the game right from the get-go is the Slums. We get it; it’s just the start. But still, it feels downright weird buying Tents in Slums for cheap, adding a sleeping tent, and selling them for $1700 to $2200 a pop, making 100 to 150% profit. At one point, we even felt like we were just ripping off the homeless.

Getting to the Suburbs, things felt much better though. The houses in the second level cost more than 30 grand and when you negotiate, you can often sell them for 60 to 70 grand. Once you get to the Suburbs, your decoration options also open up as you can put Beds, Closets, and all sorts of other furniture in your properties to make more profits.

Renovating the Properties

The good thing that the game does is that it lets you renovate the properties in Suburbs and Cities to improve their value. You can do that by accessing the ShopExpress app in your Office Computer and buying decorations. The price for the decorations and how many stars they’ll add are also listed clearly.

Once you add a couple of furniture into your property, you can get more stars which means you’ll be able to sell it for a higher profit. The number of decorations available are pretty decent, but we’re hoping we’ll see a lot more varieties when the game finally comes out.

Upgrading Your Office

The first office you get is pretty small. It’s located in the basement of a building, but once you start making some real money, you get to move on to a larger office. To buy your first big office, you need to invest $75,000 dollars which shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

Buying a bigger office offers some minor perks. Getting to Office No.2 gives you 10% higher Customer Traffic and also increases the maximum number of clients by 1. It also improves your Purchasing Power, reducing the prices of houses in the Suburbs and City. Credit where credit is due; this is a pretty nice feature.

Negotiating with the Buyers

You buy properties from sellers and aim to flip them for a profit to buyers – that’s pretty much the entire gameplay loop in Real Estate Simulator. However, the negotiation mechanics in this game are seriously broken and often defy real-world logic.

Let me give you an example. I had listed a tent in the slums for $1,500, which was already a significant markup from my purchase price of $750. When I put it up for sale, buyers started flocking into the office, but not everyone was interested in it.

Finally, I got a buyer who wanted to buy it for around $1275. To simply mess around, I countered the offer with $1700 – higher than the original listing! But surprisingly, the buyer immediately accepted the deal.

For a game that’s all about negotiating and building your real estate empire, this seems like a pretty big problem.

Real Estate Simulator Review – 6/10

If you’re bored and want to try your hand at selling some houses, Real Estate Simulator can be a pretty nice way to pass a couple of hours. But for gamers who want to invest time and effort into a proper simulator game, we wouldn’t really recommend it, at least not right now.

The game gets boring way too quickly. It lacks any real choice, strategy or negotiation tactics and the gameplay loop gets extremely repetitive after a while.

Does the game have potential? Yes. However, there are too many rough edges right now for us to rate it any higher.

If the devs address these issues and add some extra features to make the gameplay less repetitive, it might turn out to be a good simulator game. We’ve got our fingers crossed for when the game comes out on March 22nd, 2024.