Web Whizzes Renovate Rickety Sites to Flip for Profit

Web entrepreneurs are taking a page from the real-estate book: they’re buying badly designed websites cheaply, fixing them up, and selling them at a profit. Website sales on eBay and similar sites have soared in the past few months, with many site-flippers happy to sell for just a few hundred dollars, the New York Times reports.

Buyers toy with the fonts, colors, and layout of a page. Making sites more visible to web searches is key. Focused on appealing to advertisers, many flippers seek out speciality niche sites like bird-cage.com. “It’s about creating value where there was none,” said one self-proclaimed “web property developer.” (More internet stories.)