Real Estate

The Next Hot Housing Market Is Out of This World. It’s in the Metaverse.


In March, Gabe Sierra, a contractor whose family has been in the construction business for more than 30 years, will take offers for his latest creation: an 11,000-square-foot mansion with seven bedrooms and a pool in Pinecrest, Miami.

To sweeten the deal, he’s throwing in the exact same house and a King Kong-size, bright green gorilla that scales downtown skyscrapers and stalks the streets of South Florida.

The twin home is in the metaverse — a catchall phrase for the growing conglomerate of immersive digital worlds where avatars work, play and purchase goods. Pixelated parcels of land are being bought, sold and built upon in a market now worth $1.4 billion, making the metaverse a new frontier for real estate builders and investors.

Mr. Sierra, an avid gamer who uses a purple gorilla as one of his own avatars, paid $10,000 for a digital parcel in an online world called the Sandbox, and then partnered with Voxel Architects, an architecture firm specializing in virtual 3-D properties, to build the digital home to pair with the real thing. It all hits the auction block in March, and he’s hoping for a sale price of around $10 million.

It’s also a chance to bend the rules of physics. Everyrealm, a metaverse technology and infrastructure company, partnered with artists including Misha Khan and Daniel Arsham to create the Row, a futuristic collection of digital homes marked by melting, Salvador Dali-esque angles and dreamlike floating spheres. The homes premiered at Art Basel in an immersive exhibit and are not yet for sale, but Janine Yoriro, Everyrealm’s chief executive, says she anticipates each will sell for about $75,000.

Buyers will receive a certificate of authenticity as well as 3-D models of their home, and then be able to place it on a plot of land in the online gaming world of their choice.

“We called upon a bunch of cultural references, one of which was the idea of a Sears home, when back at the turn of the century you could buy plans for a home and then build it anywhere from New York City to Des Moines,” Ms. Yoriro said.

Some online worlds present a digital map of the earth, allowing buyers to purchase places or coordinates that hold sentimental or historic value. T.J. Brisbois, 37, a real estate investor in Detroit, owns about a dozen land parcels in Motor City, but not on Earth — in the Detroit of Upland, a gaming portal mapped to the real world. He buys them, marks them up and resells them. He estimates he’s made a 10 percent return on his money since he started in 2022.

His purchases, he said, are just an extension of his business in the real world.

“I didn’t really get it until I got into it, and I was willing to put in a few real-world dollars,” Mr. Brisbois said. “It’s important for people that are in real estate, because there’s real opportunity here.”

Buyers can swap out everything from countertop materials to overall architectural style. The move, said Amit Desai, KB Home’s chief marketing officer, is a natural outgrowth of the virtual walk-through options that have increased since 2020.

“Even before the pandemic, we were on this path of providing enhanced digital tools, but the pandemic accelerated the need for us to really allow prospective home buyers to search for a home from the comfort of their current homes,” Mr. Desai said. “The metaverse is just a nice extension of that.”



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