Ever since Mark Zuckerberg, founder, and CEO of social media conglomerate introduced most of the world to the metaverse and his company’s ambitions of taking the rest of the world on the journey, the conversations have not ceased coming. Now the metaverse is being projected with opening up opportunities in many industries, including real estate.
Defined as a combination of multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and video where users ‘live’ within a digital universe, the metaverse is still in its infancy. But despite being early days, the floods of investments are not slowing down.
The market is projected to reach $783.3 billion in 2024 compared with 478.7 billion in 2020, representing a compound annual growth rate of 13.1 percent.
While other investors seek these opportunities in different industries, Windfall Technologies, a blockchain-based transaction management solution that gives individuals and businesses the tools they need to control and protect personal identity information, is pushing in the direction of virtual real estate.
Virtual real estate, to be sure, refers to using real estate investment software to do property research and investment property analysis, and ultimately, buy an investment property.
There are two broad ways to consider virtual real estate. The first is as a service in which operators utilize virtual reality technology to carry out real estate services. This is the earliest form of virtual real estate.
Experts describe it as a cost-effective way to do out-of-state real estate investing because it saves on travelling and the associated costs and time needed.
For example, a Nigerian investor looking to buy property in Dubai or the United Kingdom without needing to travel out of the country or resident to the location of the property. Virtual real estate investors do long-distance real estate investing from the comfort of their homes.
In recent times, there has been an increasing number of offers from countries to Nigerians to invest in properties in return for citizenship. There are at least 22 countries across the world providing this Citizenship by Investment (CBI) program and Nigerians who can afford to purchase properties in these countries are actively subscribing to them.
Long-distance real estate investing can be confusing because there are so many options to choose from. This is why virtual real estate investing is essential. With real estate software like Windfall Technology, users can know the state of the property as well as the housing market in the country they plan to invest in.
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The second way to consider virtual real estate is as an ecosystem or a virtual environment in which people can interact almost the same way they do in real life. This is the premise of Zuckerberg’s metaverse. In this metaverse, a virtual society is set up that functions in a similar fashion as a physical society. What it means is property transactions are conducted between individuals or groups, but mostly on the blockchain, hence tokens are generated to conduct these transactions.
In either case, virtual real estate requires the use of virtual reality machines.
Virtual real estate as an ecosystem is getting attraction from different industries and real estate is one of the beneficiaries of the technology. The COVID-19 pandemic was partly responsible for the growth in the use of virtual reality technology in real estate. A lot of investment went into virtual machines in 2020 alone which led to expectations of a boom in the virtual real estate industry.
On November 23, a patch of virtual real estate in the online world Decentraland sold for a record $2.3 million worth of cryptocurrency. Decentraland is an online environment – also known as ‘metaverse’ where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around and meet people as avatars. The Windfall token is currently listed on the Coinmarketcap and Coinbase exchanges.
According to another report by NonFungible.com in December 2021, a remarkable 25 percent of Non-fungible Token purchases were for digital land in the metaverse, totalling over $300 million.
Today there is a veritable gold rush in the metaverse, with young people and celebrities like Snoop Dogg investing millions of dollars in virtual real estate.
Windfall’s ambition is to become one of the most prominent virtual real estate mediums in the world. By leveraging blockchain, Windfall is able to provide full asset management services for customers’ virtual real estate indulgence. There is also end-to-end management irrespective of the type of business and institutions using the Windfall ecosystem.
The Windfall ecosystem is enabled by a utility token known as the Windfall token (WFT), which is used for the settlement of transaction-related data between Windfall participants – such as customers and service providers. Users can earn WFT tokens for completing a variety of tasks, such as signing up for a service through the platform or introducing new users, while validators can earn WFTs for validating for service providers.
The company’s website offers renting opportunities on virtual real estate to customers should they want to do advertising or marketing. It also helps in the technical and visual maintenance of the assets.
Experts project that the investment virtual real estate ecosystem in 2022 will surpass what has been seen in previous years. However, this time NFTs (the technological standard for unique digital assets, like artwork or virtual homes) will be the major driver.
Irina Karagyaur, head of metaverse growth at Unique Network sees the future of NFTs as multi-chain, a more diverse pathway that solves the limitations of the Ethereum blockchain and enhances its usage to present once unimaginable opportunities that touch multiple corners of culture and commerce.
“In this multi-chain future, we will see vast opportunities and diverse use cases made possible by alternative chains like Solana, Tezos, Polkadot, Kusama, Cardano, and many others. These chains bring answers for scalability, network congestion, and the ability to truly fractionalize ownership, allowing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to become usable and transferable in the metaverse – breaking out of the confines of traditional digital collectibles – perhaps into the real world,” he wrote in an article.
