Fractions of prime real-estate are being sold in Atlanta. On March 24th, Roofstock, a leading online marketplace for investors in the rental-home sector, sold an Atlanta home for more than $200,000 in less than three minutes.
The home was sold in partnership with RealT, another tech startup that focuses on tokenizing real estate and enabling fractional investing. The goal of RealT is to simplify global access to real estate investments in the U.S.
The home was sold through a tokenized Ethereum-based NFT and facilitated by OpenSea, the top NFT marketplace. The new partnership will enable RealT to provide blockchain-based real-estate exposure to investors from other countries.
During the auction, there were a total of 722 orders placed and 670 unique token holders made by the end of the sale. The average purchase is worth approximately $298 in ETH, and the sale, which took two minutes and forty-six seconds, attracted a sales volume of $214,884.
There were heavy restrictions around the float of the initial fractionalization offering, and Roofstock and RealT have agreed to comply with the relevant authorities, since regulation of digital assets and real estate is largely undetermined. The NFT home also features a KYC (know your customer) flag to enhance security and transparency.
The vice president of Roofstock, Sanjay Raghavan, said that the company creates a Wyoming LLC for every property they own to act as a shell where the corresponding NFT is held. People can sell their fractionalized shares on NFT marketplaces.
The real-world Atlanta home has two bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, and is 1,500 square feet. Because the NFT home is owned by multiple people, it’s unclear who will be able to use the home — if anyone. More likely, it will be used solely as an investment vehicle.
NFTs Are Slowly Being Adopted to Sell Real Estate
Roofstock and RealT’s successful sale of an Atlanta home is exciting for people who are interested in investing in fractionalized real estate NFTs. But this isn’t the first move we’ve seen from these companies, and others, in the area of Web3 real estate. At Rarity Sniper, we’ve covered several articles on the topic. Here are some of the top headlines.
First, about six months ago, Roofstock sold a home in South Carolina as an NFT for $175,000. For the deal, Roofstock partnered with the Origin Protocol to tokenize the real estate property, which they say will spare buyers and sellers some of the high fees associated with buying real estate.
About a year ago, a Florida home was auctioned on the Ethereum blockchain as an NFT and sold for $653,000 in ETH. The five-bedroom home in Gulfport was auctioned by Propy, and was the first U.S. home to be auctioned as an NFT in the United States.
Next, also about a year ago, Voxel Architects, ONE Sotheby’s International Realty, and Meta Residence founder Gabe Sierra teamed up to offer a real-world home that comes with a virtual home in The Sandbox metaverse. The move is the first real-estate deal to combine a real-world home with an NFT counterpart in the metaverse.
Real estate is not nearly as evolved in Web3 as some other sectors of the economy, due mainly to the lack of regulation and uncertainty that still exists in the space. That said, companies like Roofstock and RealT are proving that there’s growing interest in the sector. We’ll be following up on any new developments in the story.