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March 24, 2022

Real Estate in the Metaverse

Real estate in the Metaverse. A crazy idea or part of the future of real estate? Let’s see what conclusions we can come to shall we?

I’ve seen several posts on social media asking real estate agents whether they plan to take their talents to the Metaverse. I thought I’d take a moment to think through this. Turns out, I have a few observations to make.

Virtual Real Estate Is Not Real Estate

The first comment is a too-obvious observation. Virtual real estate is not real estate, no matter how much some people want to conflate the two.

I say this as someone who is well conversed in the virtual world. Despite never having owned or developed virtual property, I know several people who have, and/or are knowledgeable in this subject.

Can You Explain More?

Network effect will tend towards one primary world with secondary worlds coming off of it, but even that is no guarantee. There was a time when MySpace was the biggest social network after all. So the idea in real estate, that you should buy land because they’re not making any more of it, doesn’t apply to virtual land.

Second, real estate is valuable because of travel time and effort. ‘Location, location, location’ is a thing because there’s a huge difference between living downtown near bars and restaurants and living an hour out in the sticks. It takes time and every to move your physical body from one location to another.

In a virtual world, that time and energy is entirely arbitrary and constrained only by software. There is nothing that prevents worlds from enabling teleportation. Play some video games sometimes and you’ll see for yourself.

This means that the idea of ‘prime real estate in a virtual world is unconnected to time and distance, it’s more related to eyeballs, to traffic, to population. It’s not real estate, it’s more like a website.

Virtual Real Estate and Data

The second point to make is that much of the value of a real estate agent in the real world is related to expertise.

Because real estate is unique, and because real estate is difficult to gather (somebody somewhere has to go do things like measure the lot, take pictures of the house, etc.), those who are in the business of transacting in real estate have an advantage in information access. Plus, even if ‘data’ becomes widely available, there are insights about a property, about a neighbourhood, about an area that is really difficult to put into structured databases.

The example I used in the past is knowing which side of the street floods when it rains. It’s theoretically possible for that information to be in a database somewhere, but I really doubt it.

Why Not?

This lack of information, lack of data, is not a thing in the Metaverse. Because the entire world exists in a database somewhere. Everything is the world is an entry in some database. Somewhere.

There is no need to ever hire an inspector to make sure the plumbing is as represented in the paperwork about the property. Because the database itself would have all of the information on the ‘plumbing’ inside the ‘walls’ of the ‘house’. Every single thing in a virtual world is known to the system as a whole, because every single thing is an entry in a database somewhere.

So unless the world creator somehow makes that data unavailable – which goes counter to the decentralised ethos of the blockchain, web3 and the Metaverse – and then makes the data available only to a select few ‘professionals’, there isn’t anything that a real estate agent would know that the buyer and seller wouldn’t know or easily find out on their own.

Intermediaries In The Metaverse

Since the Metaverse does not exist, we won’t know precisely how intermediaries would work in that world. But if the value of professionals is not connected to them knowing something that the consumer doesn’t know, then it has to be connected to services that the professional would provide that the consumer either cannot do for himself or doesn’t want to do for himself.

So what might these be in a virtual world?

It really helps to have spent time in a virtual world to think through this. I spent several years playing virtual, interactive computer games as a teenager, so I at least have some experience. Who knew that all that time spent ‘wasted’ would one day come in quite handy? The irony…of course, technology has come a long way even in the 7 or 8 relatively short years since my teen days, so some of the things I was doing ‘in-world’ are an anachronism now. God, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?!

One example is setting up a bot to do my in-game ‘work’ whilst I was not physically able to be there myself. Apply that ‘bot’ concept to the buying and selling of virtual real estate.

furthermore, there won’t be complicated title or mortgage paperwork for virtual properties. Appraisal isn’t necessary when everything to know about the land and the property itself is already in the database. You certainly don’t need a photographer, or someone to manage repairs and renovations.

The Value Of Professionals in the Metaverse

As I see things, the only real value of a human professional in the Metaverse is judgment and wisdom. The data is entirely out there, entirely transparent, and entirely open to everyone. But that doesn’t mean that everyone will come to the same conclusions.

Everyone in the world has access to this exact same data. And tons more data besides. People will make the correct call and others will not. There are thousands of people who will use all kinds of data, interpret that data, do more research, and come up with their guesses (because that’s what they are, guesses). If you’re right, you more than likely make a fortune. If you’re wrong, well…we won’t go into that.

So What Can You Do To Get Ahead?

Being able to analyse virtual properties and come to convictions and conclusions will be enormously valuable. An enormous amount of that value comes from the fact that the person coming to the conclusion had done additional work and additional research that the consumer has not. Again, the information is available to all. The analysis takes work.

So, what will be the real value of virtual real estate professionals in the Metaverse? Well, it will be someone who has the skills to do the analysis who then has taken the time and effort to do the analysis on virtual properties. It will be someone who isn’t an intermediary, since bots and AI can do all of that easily, but an advisor.

No License Required

Add on the fact that the Metaverse will exist outside of any nation’s laws. That’s a whole long story, but it isn’t as if the Andalusian land use laws will apply to virtual real estate hosted on 20,000 servers across the globe. It simply can’t.

Which means there won’t be ‘real estate agents’ who have jobs because of a license, or because of real estate laws. There will only be virtual asset advisors who have jobs because of their skill, their judgment, and their time and effort to do the analysis. None of them will be licensed. All of them will be based on performance and results…which will be transparent, visible, and available because the transaction and the properties are all on-chain.

One More Question – Why Can’t This System Migrate To The Physical World?

Technology growth is exponential. But we can only surmise what will exist ten years from now based on what we know today. And the human mind has real trouble grasping what exponential growth looks like. So our vision is extremely limited and constrained.

But I could imagine technology advancing enough that all of the data about real physical property is also on-chain. Think about a small insect-sized bot that can crawl a house with sensors and cameras and create a full 3D image of everything in it. Imagine some satellite-based tech that does know which side of the street floods when it rains. Yes, that’s sci-fi…but like I said, we have a hard time with exponential technology growth. I know of a number of startups that are hard at work trying to digitise the physical world.

In the physical world, government authority and government power is more present. So things like licenses and title and so on will remain a thing for quite some time.

Nonetheless, the trend towards disintermediation of human beings does strike me as inevitable. That hardly means the end of real estate agents, but it does mean a shift in value of professionals in the real world to match their value in the virtual world. Analysis, judgment, time and effort.

Let’s Leave The Metaverse With This Thought

It might not be a terrible idea to throw new real estate agents into the Metaverse to be virtual real estate advisors to see who sinks and who swims.

The ones that swim? Those are likely the ones that will dominate physical real estate in the years ahead.

 


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