For example, blocks located next to a famous company or celebrity often go for a premium. Apart from consumers, many companies are also trying to buy a stake in the metaverse real estate sphere. Samsung launched a metaverse store location known as Samsung 837X, Adidas purchased a plot intended for exclusive brand content, and Atari owns virtual land where people can play their video games. Metaverse real estate (also known as digital real estate and virtual real estate) is made up of parcels of land in a virtual, interactive world – simply put, pixels on a computer. People buy and sell this land with cryptocurrencies, generally as an investment. Virtual land owners can also be companies that wish to extend their services and physical world presence in the digital world.
Moreover, the expectation is that the metaverse will grow immensely in the future, so businesses and individual investors have started leveraging the metaverse for marketing early on. In the long-term, this will depend on the future of the metaverse itself. Certainly, some very big and influential organizations – from Facebook (now known as Meta, of course) to Microsoft and Nvidia are betting big that it is essentially the “next generation” of the internet. This is likely to point to a healthy future for the digital land and real estate market.
You can research the different platforms from your computer and see which areas you’re interested in. You might be able to find sales history and other useful metrics on sites such as NonFungible.com or WeMeta. Decentraland is a virtual reality platform that allows users to purchase plots of land as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through the MANA cryptocurrency, which uses the Ethereum blockchain. But exactly how the metaverse will evolve is still highly uncertain, and investing in virtual real estate should be considered speculative and risky. If you can’t afford to lose your entire investment, virtual real estate is likely not the best option for you.
Here’s how to buy digital real estate in the metaverse
- So to start your metaverse real estate portfolio, you’ll need to have your own digital crypto wallet.
- Once the purchase is approved by the seller, the land will appear in your crypto wallet.
- The best long-term investments tend to have more stable businesses and lower risk, relative to virtual real estate.
- They indicate massive gains for early “settlers” on the virtual platforms.
- It’s hard to describe it accurately since no universally accepted definition exists.
Reasons to buy virtual land in the metaverse don’t differ much from the real world – in 2021, a digital plot of land next to Snoopverse – Snoop Dogg’s virtual world on the Sandbox platform was sold for a whopping $450,000. Alternatively, you can head to your chosen metaverse platform, in this case, the Sandbox, and purchase virtual land NFTs from there. You can purchase land on an NFT marketplace like OpenSea and search for land NFTs of a specific metaverse, or alternatively, head straight to a specific metaverse platform, such as Decentraland Marketplace, and buy the land NFT directly.
• Sandbox’s weekly average sale price peaked at more than $35,000 in January 2022, but was just $3,990 in early August 2022. • Also in 2021, an investor purchased a virtual plot next to rapper Snoop Dogg’s digital mansion in Sandbox for $450,000. The offers that appear on this site are from companies that compensate us. But this compensation does not influence the information we publish, or the reviews that you see on this site. We do not include the universe of companies or financial offers that may be available to you. Now, you just have to browse different pieces of available land and select the one you want to buy.
Sandbox
The platform also has built-in tools for editing, creating avatars, and chatting. In the past few years, the Sandbox has forged strategic partnerships with game companies like Atari, investors like Square Enix, brands like Shaun the Sheep, and celebrities like Snoop Dogg. These partnerships have given it more appeal both as a creative space and as an investment platform. But with an equally big potential for high returns, it may be worth the risks. However, like with all other investments and business ventures, you must do your due diligence before deciding to take risks. Your best bet may be to buy land on a secondary marketplace like OpenSea.
First of all, head to the Decentraland platform and create your account. Just like some areas of the world like London, New York, or Tokyo are where real estate prices are the most expensive, up-and-coming areas can offer more lucrative deals; however, they come with higher risk. Investors who made purchases following the excitement of Facebook’s announcement now likely regret their decisions, as prices have tumbled more than 80 percent in some instances. If interest in a particular metaverse begins to rise, you could hold the digital asset for a brief period and then resell it at a substantial profit margin.
How do people enter the metaverse?
Right now a popular platform is The Sandbox where brands, businesses and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton have their land however, Decentraland, Voxels, Worldwide Webb and Treeverse are other options. The buyer purchases the NFT with the cryptocurrency the seller requests. Once the purchase is made, the NFT is transferred to the buyer’s virtual wallet, which gives them complete rights to the plot of virtual land.
You can also build a virtual house on it and give it up for rent or set up a digital art gallery and allow budding artists to showcase their artwork. From the acquisition right through to the point of sale, the process of building an impenetrable sales team isn’t complex but it is calculated. Discover proven SEO tips to double organic traffic to your ecommerce business and drive more sales. The minimum price for land in Decentraland, as of Wednesday, was about 3.087 Ether, or the equivalent of $13,675, according to OpenSea.
Your profitability will likely depend on the sentiment of other investors towards the metaverse and owning virtual land. Many of the early buyers of virtual real estate are doubly invested—in the platforms themselves and through personal plays like DAOs buying and developing new land—so their bullishness is ultimately self-serving. The metaverse rent expense accountingtools refers to a handful of platforms on the internet that have built interactive worlds complete with virtual entertainment and businesses.
On the safe side, companies are buying land on some of the largest top metaverse platforms, such as The Sandbox, Decentraland, or Meta’s Horizon Worlds, with the highest user count and widest audience. But it’s not just entrepreneurs who are investing in metaverse real estate. If you plan on investing in metaverse real estate, look for areas that have the potential for development. Places where people can potentially congregate will be more valuable than those in nondescript areas. You can score these properties at relatively lower prices, build on them, and wait for prices to drive up. They are programmable spaces in virtual reality platforms where people can socialize, play games, sell NFфTs, attend meetings, go to virtual concerts, and do countless other virtual activities.
Popularity revolves around news cycles, social media trends, and cryptocurrency values. In general, many metaverse websites are currently platforms whose prices are fueled by hype. They’re also often broken, glitchy, and prone to economic manipulation. Investing in a piece of land owned virtually would’ve sounded absurd a couple of years ago. Today, virtual real estate sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars of cold, hard cash (though converted into cryptocurrency). As the metaverse looms, investors and crypto enthusiasts are going all in, and buying virtual real estate is the next big thing after digital artwork.
One of the biggest sales the past year is a property adjacent to Snoop Dogg’s in The Sandbox. As technology gets more complex and graphics become more lifelike, virtual worlds will get closer to mimicking the physical world. Companies will likely continue to innovate and blend virtual and physical worlds as more people engage with their brands.
The NFT you purchase contains coordinates to the area you control and shows where it is located on the metaverse map. Once the transaction is confirmed, you can see the NFT in your digital wallet, and will be registered as the new owner. Depending on the aim of your purchase, you can either hold on to it as a long-term investment, flip it for profit, or build something on it. Bankrate.com is an independent, advertising-supported publisher and comparison service. We are compensated in exchange for placement of sponsored products and services, or by you clicking on certain links posted on our site. Therefore, this compensation may impact how, where and in what order products appear within listing categories, except where prohibited by law for our mortgage, home equity and other home lending products.
Be sure that your wallet is compatible with the metaverse platform where you’re making your purchase. Voxels is another metaverse built on the Ethereum blockchain where users can purchase land to build on and navigate through the virtual world’s roads and buildings. The average weekly sale price for land in Voxels reached more than $14,000 in early 2022, but has since fallen to less than $700 in August 2022, according to WeMeta. As our lives become more and more intertwined with the digital world, some investors have started to focus on real estate in virtual spaces such as the metaverse. Real estate sales in the metaverse have exploded in recent years and topped $500 million in 2021, according to metaverse data provider MetaMetric Solutions. There are several virtual metaverse platforms that you can buy property on.