Real Homes Being Sold As NFTs — What Next?!
Since the beginning of February 2022, reports of actual brick-and-mortar homes being sold as NFTs have increased in North America and Europe.
Changing the Perception of Reality
NFTs and the metaverse have helped us question what we value and how we perceive reality, and today people are investing in virtual assets in a manner they wouldn’t have been willing to in 2019. Wild news headlines about people spending thousands of dollars on plots of lands in the metaverse have caught public attention far and wide.
As a scarce resource, land has always been valuable to humans. Initially, we jostled over the most fertile plots for agriculture, and while fertile lands are still necessary, we spend fortunes to purchase real estate in the correct location.
People spend millions of dollars on undersized apartments in Manhattan, London, and other major cities worldwide. Lands and real estate in major cities are more valuable than those in the countryside and outskirts of major cities. We can see this phenomenon playing out in the metaverse today, where land situated in certain places and close to celebrity-owned properties is valued more than others.
A Season of Firsts
As of February 7, 2022, a home has been sold as an NFT in the US state of Florida for $650,000, and it’s not the first physical real estate NFT to be listed on the market. A home in Gulfport, Florida, has been auctioned as an NFT, and ownership of the NFT will grant ownership to the physical property. In addition to the NFT, ownership will also be accompanied by a custom-made mural from a community artist.
https://twitter.com/PropyInc/status/1491451571787509760?s=20&t=V8xS4Rp46_jd5Z8mblyzpw
Propy, a real estate technology firm, recently announced that they’d be selling a Gulfport, FL home and that the home is being sold at an auction through a digital-only token. The winner will get ownership of a US-based entity that owns the Florida home.
This sale is a first of its kind in the United States, and you can be a part of history by participating in this auction for a property that’s almost 2,000 square-foot.
Global Movement
Propy has a successful track record of selling crypto-pegged real estate; they sold the Ukraine apartment of Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, for the equivalent of $113,000 in Ether. Propy and other companies in the space are helping smoothen the real estate purchase process.
If you’ve ever tried to purchase a home, you’d be aware of how stilted the process is, and companies like Propy are committed to easing the process and making it more accessible to young people. According to Arrington, “the traditional real estate sale process is arduous and broken…It’s an opaque, dated, and unnecessarily lengthy process, full of risks such as wire fraud.”
https://twitter.com/twinxalot/status/1491449197320892417?cxt=HHwWgsDT7ZLJ2LIpAAAA
The future of real estate is moving digital. Still, a significant drawback in purchasing an NFT home, you’ll need enough Ethereum to power transactions, and currently, it may be a little tricky to access lending options.
