Let’s talk real estate.
What about the intersection of blockchain and real estate? Is it all a sea of buzzwords and hype like web3, NFTs and “to the moon”, or is there something of substance here?
This week on the Invezz podcast, I hosted Sanjay Raghavan, Head of Web3 Initiatives at Roofstock, a real estate investment marketplace.
Roofstock has had quite the week, closing the first NFT sale of its web3 subsidiary, a property located in South Carolina, USA.
I never imagined I could buy and finance a house with a simple click, rather than going through the time-consuming and cumbersome traditional settlement and mortgage process
The buyer, a real estate investor by the name of Adam Slipakoff, on the transaction.
This caught my eye, as real estate has long been talked about as ripe for blockchain disruption, but it has been somewhat slow compared to other industries. Sanjay and I chat about why this is, and how regulation still means that a lot of the more dizzying scenarios – such as fractional ownership of houses being sold on the blockchain – remain a long way off.
The same goes with mortgages, which thus far nobody has been able to crack. We cover lots in this pod, but of course the rising mortgage rates and what they mean for the real estate market are one of those topics.
So too was the US dollar, the seemingly invincible currency that is crushing the rest around the world. Sanjay and I talk through what this means for investing, and specifically real estate investing, and how it can protect investors.
Ten months of work for Roofstock, Sanjay said, was behind making the NFT sale possible. It’s daunting to even think of all the legal, regulatory and consulting work that went on behind the scenes to make this possible.
But the pod got me thinking – what does the future of real estate look like? What is interesting about this transaction is that it occurred on the blockchain, but didn’t really have much to do with crypto in a traditional sense. At the end of the day, it was just a house being bought in USD.
Sure, it was tokenised in NFT form and the USD was on-chain in the form of a stablecoin, but at the end of the day, if this works and streamlines the process, then what is not to like?
So much of crypto is misunderstood. There are so many aspects to the space that are nothing but money grabs, pump-and-dumps and completely devoid of utility. But it is these kinds of goals – genuinely making a problem easier, such as the cumbersome process of buying real estate – that excites me about the space.
We covered a whole bunch of topics here, but it was a fun one. Anyone interested in real estate or technology should find something they like.
As always feel free to reach out with comments!
Continue the conversation on Twitter with @InvezzPortal, @DanniiAshmore and @rsonchain / @Roofstock. Or visit https://onchain.roofstock.com/ for more information.
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