Buying land and properties in the metaverse is the hottest trend in real estate these days. In the year 2021 itself virtual land sales reached $500 million. It is estimated that real estate sales could reach up to $1 billion or more in 2022.
Investors worldwide are eagerly looking to earn fast money with this innovative asset class.
Let’s understand the details of virtual lands before we jump into the step wise process to buy land in the metaverse.
What is Virtual Land in Metaverse?
You can imagine the metaverse as a replica of our physical world. Here, you can interact with other users in a highly realistic and natural manner.
Advanced technologies like Blockchain,NFTs, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence, 5G and Cloud computing are used to create Metaverse.
This whole metaverse is not controlled by any one entity. Anyone can make an investment in it. You can use its environment, objects, technologies and available spaces in the form of lands and properties.
Under Metaverse, you can buy real estate plots called virtual ‘parcels’. These parcels are 3D spaces. You can imagine a land or shop like in your games.
People are buying these real estate plots in the metaverse. You can then convert these plots into shops, houses, camps or anything as you would please. It all depends on your imagination.
You can then rent these plots or properties, or use them to attract other users for your business-like advertisements or sell your products and services that exist in the real world.
It’s like another place where users can communicate and exchange their views and make businesses.
This is the reason why it is becoming a hotspot
Among businesses and innovators.
Facebook and Microsoft are claiming their rights on metaverse. As both tech giants want to become a sole leader in the metaverse market. They can see huge potential to earn profits from users in it.
This is also like a new world of advertisement and gaining customers for the real world. Mstaverse is a new marketplace. It’s lucrative to buy a place for your business too.
Dedicated platforms are available where you can buy, sell, and rent out these virtual lands. Buyers and sellers are mostly dealing in four platforms. These are Decentraland, Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Somnium.
You can also list your metaverse property or land over decentralised platforms of estate agents like nonfungible.com and opensea.io. These are the third party resellers just like real-life real estate.
Follow the given steps If you are interested in buying a virtual real estate plot or property.
- Select a metaverse platform
Before buying a land you will have to select a metaverse platform like Decentraland or Sandbox.
- Choose your crypto wallet
Create your crypto wallet as per your preferences for security features, fee, transaction time, offline or online mode, etc. Wallet will enable you to hold your owned cryptocurrencies that will be used to buy the metaverse land or property. Before choosing any wallet make sure it supports the NFTs land’s Blockchains. After successfully setting up your wallet you will get a string of words known as “seed phrase”. Keep this phrase safe preferably somewhere offline as this phrase will help you to recover your wallet access in case you lose your wallet.
- Connect your wallet to your metaverse platform
You can visit metaverse marketplaces like sandbox and decentraland to directly bid on listed land plots there. Another option is to bid on indirect or secondary marketplaces like OpenSea to bid for these virtual properties.
To start the bidding process, you have to connect your wallet to your selected platform. You just have to ensure that your wallet supports the Blockchain of your selected land project. So you will sign up to your platform and then add your wallet there.
- Buy cryptocurrency from your platform and transfer to your wallet
If your wallet does not hold required cryptocurrency then you need to buy from the platform. For example, you can buy either Ether or SAND cryptos in case of Sandbox as most of the land deals accept payment only in Ether on Sandbox. You can buy these cryptocurrencies with your debit or credit cards.
- Choose the best land on metaverse platform
You can select the land property enlisted at your primary metaverse platform or at secondary platfor like opensea.io. you have two options to buy these properties – you can bid the land that is available for sale or can directly quote the fixed rate in cryptocurrency. most of the properties are sold on primary metaverse platforms. hence you can buy these properties on secondary platforms.
Is investment in metaverse land risky?
Like real life property metaverse lands are also not immune to risks. First risk is that you can not utilize the land in reality. Second risk is attached with its potential development with regard to its environment and locality. It’s very much like a real life scenario.
According to a poll survey by a professional social network Blind, only 13% technocrats are investing in metaverse real estate. As many technologists believe that investment in land is profitable because it’s limited. Scarcity always generates demand and more profit. But virtual lands can be created in many numbers and how such infinity can make value in virtual lands.
Warning: metaverse real estate land value can reach to zero if the associated metaverse platform is abandoned or banned.
Although some metaverse platforms promise that they will not create new land to keep the scarcity.
There will surely be efforts in the future to make the metaverse scarce through network effects or artificially.
But, no one can deny the fact that metaverse land is a new and innovative asset class for portfolio diversification. It holds immense value and wealth opportunities for the future. This asset class and its uses are still evolving. So, early investment can provide a rainy profit with more developments and innovative uses in the coming days.
