Metaverse: What are the realities for real estate? Hervé Ana, Real Estate Business Accelerator

Metaverse is plural!

For Wikipedia, the metaverse is a virtual world where spaces are accessed through a headset or screen. The term is also regularly used to describe the future version of the Internet. In another definition, a metaverse is understood as a collection of virtual worlds connected to the Internet and perceived in augmented reality. These metaverses can be social networks, video games, trading platforms, corporate networks or even video conferencing. People are represented by avatars.

In October 2021, after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would devote a large portion of its activities to the development of a metaverse called Horizon Worlds, many metaverses were developed. In turn, Microsoft launched Mesh for Teams, a solution that allows you to appear as an avatar in Teams and also to meet in a special virtual space. In terms of real estate, two metaverses, Decentraland and Sandbox, generated 16,000 sales in just a few months, representing $229 million worth of virtual property. Apart from these specialties, dozens of metaverse projects have been launched over the past year.

Two visions of real estate are possible in metaverses. The first view is an investor who buys virtual property on one of the platforms that allow it.

The second is a real estate agent who will use the metaverse to market real estate, just as an advertising site or social network already does.

Several metaverses are presented as cities where you can acquire a plot of land and build a building. Some brands, especially luxury or sportswear, have stepped in to either protect their brands by preventing piracy or sell their products. So we’ll see avatars wearing Gucci or wearing Nike. The enthusiasm generated by the launch of Metaverses created the first wave of virtual real estate purchases.

Real estate agencies such as Metaverse Immobilier are emerging in this emerging market. “A (Swiss) consulting company that supports its clients in buying and selling real estate in various metaverses, mainly in Decentraland and The Sandbox” : metaverse-immobilier .tech. American agency Tiliaverse is also a good example of a meta real estate agency.

The idea is simple: metaverses will allow you to present an avatar or a digital twin of the property for sale in its environment, in its neighborhood, all this in a virtual form where the client is used to growing, even living. . exceptionally.

But until then, one can simply use the metaverse to display a 3D representation of a good. The most prominent project is Versity, Agences de Papa’s real estate metaverse.

It will launch in a year, but a visit to versite.io already gives you a sense of the concept.

The first questions came quickly from experts pointing out that the global metaverse, the popular web 3.0, requires a technical and software infrastructure that does not yet exist and that we will not be able to implement for several decades.

Then the meta real estate bubble burst and Decentraland and Sandbox experienced a 97% drop in real estate transactions as well as an 80% drop in average land prices. At the same time, cryptocurrencies, which are transacted in metaverses, have seen their prices collapse.

But the most disturbing was published by Les Echos newspaper. This means that Horizon Worlds, Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, is suffering from quality issues, and worse, the development teams aren’t using it. In fact, the former Facebook metaverse fails to convince, and its audience is quite low, with only 300,000 users, mostly located in the United States. When you know that Meta has invested 13 billion dollars in the development of the metaverse, you worry…

Finally, there seems to be a gap between the communication that claims the metaverse is out there and we’ll all be living in it tomorrow, and the reality of an exciting innovation, but one that remains in an invention phase that will still be developed and then released. . It will be adopted first by the Geeks audience, and then, perhaps, by a larger number.

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