Could blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFT) be the new frontier in real estate? The technologies are increasingly used in this field, as in the United States where a house in NFT has just been sold.
An NFT house visible on OpenSea
The “tokenization” of real estate is underway, if we believe the latest initiatives observed around the world. In South Carolina, the Roofstock company has understood this, as it recently sold a house as an NFT.
The property was sold for $175,000, and the title is the non-fungible token registered on the blockchain. The transaction is visible on the OpenSea marketplace. The NFT listed under the address name, and the site lists the “properties” in the collection, such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
For this sale to be legal, Roofstock had to open a limited liability company (LLC), the equivalent of limited liability companies in France. The company then takes possession of the property, tokenizes it and creates an NFT that represents the title to the property.
Buying a house in one click?
What this means is that interested parties can look at offers on marketplaces, and acquire the titles in question very easily. Sanjay Raghavan, the head of Web3 initiatives at Roofstock, explained that the goal was precisely to simplify the purchase of real estate:
“Our goal was to reduce the time it takes to sell and transact a Web3 property to minutes (versus the usual three weeks).”
Roofstock also plans to rely on decentralized finance (DeFi) in the future to facilitate payments. In any case, real estate is one of the sectors where blockchain technologies seem to be integrated most seamlessly. It is therefore likely that solutions based on NFTs will spread in the future.
