I have seen people recommending buying plushies and flowers overseas and then selling at a profit on the market or using your bazaar. But I don't understand who would buy at the highly inflated prices. Are there npcs who buy things or are we literally just trying to sell to other players?
It's like with rentals you see people renting for £1 how can I compete with that whilst actually making money?
Things sell for more in torn because of the time and effort required to buy the item
Something like certain plushies are only sold aborad meaning there is one place to get them. You can also only carry a limited amount of items back with you making it hard for someone to personally import items
For most traders making museum sets it makes the most sense to be able to buy in bulk in torn for a little more than it is for them to run the plushies aswell. Its also just an example of supply and demand. There is a limited supply of them in torn and a high demand to make sets so the price goes up
If you're not aware, a full set of flowers or plushies can be exchanged for points at the museum (once you've completed the relevant education courses). So, as is my understanding, traders are looking to complete their sets for points. As for renting, if it's not a fully furnished private island, no one is really interested.
You can buy 100 kitten plushies right now for $25 each and sell them for $750! I've made up these numbers as I'm flying but they are reasonably close. Since there is demand for plushies as sets of them can be turned into points, you make a huge profit selling those kitten plushies.
But what if you could buy Nessie Plusies for $250 and sell them for $45,000? The profit from just one of those would be more than 50ish kitten plushies! Im in a good faction and have a large suitcase so I can bring back 29 Nessie plushies at a time for 1.3 million. . . And THAT is why there is so much great advice to get to lv 15 and fly.
I may look like a high-level player to you but I assure you that I'm not. Players much higher than me often, though not always, stop flying and shift to other things like running 10* businesses, collecting passive income from stock blocks, trading RW weapons, buying plushies and turning them in for points, etc
Housing less than PI here isn't worth much. The answer is you don't want to try to compete in that space as it has an almost 0 ROI. Unlike points and the plushie sets used to make them, the game just keeps adding low end housing that almost no one wants. Certain stock blocks generate random (but no PI) houses, the wheel does, noobs buy them, etc since their is very little demand for low end housing you can rent one for almost nothing. So rent one.