Roofstock recently announced their first-ever immediate Web3 sale and settlement of physical real estate on an NFT marketplace. The NFT was sold on the Roofstock marketplace, hosted by Original Protocol. The single-family rental sold for $1750,000 on Friday, the 14th of October, and included built-in on-chain finance.
The buyer used USDC to buy the property in Columbia, South Carolina. The transaction occurred instantaneously using smart-chain technology, which slashed the fees paid to 3%, well below the norm. You can check out the sale on Etherscan.
Real Estate NFTs
Roofstock and Origin’s move to real estate NFTs is intended to reinvent how houses are sold. They plan to cut out the middlemen, including estate agents and attorneys, whilst slashing fees and speeding up the transfer of ownership.
The pair believe they have a winning formula to stir up the multi-trillion-dollar industry. They may even be throwing down the gauntlet to a behemoth industry. They state in the Origin blog;
“The time and resource savings observed during the execution of this first sale sounds a fair warning to legacy real estate — investors are no longer at the whim of opaque red tape and exorbitant redundancies.”
They believe that buyers can now invest on their own terms “with frictionless mechanics that serve to increase liquidity in a historically illiquid market.”
Roofstock onChain
Roofstock onChain is the Web3 subsidiary of Roofstock, a leading digital real estate investor. The subsidiary sells single-family houses, which they tokenize on the blockchain. Each token constitutes ownership of the house.
The tokens used are called Home onChain tokens. A separate Limited Liability Company is set up for each token.
Before putting the properties up for sale, the company inspects them and if necessary, does any renovations.
After inspecting the property, Roofstock onChain lists it on their site, and the sale processed in a couple of clicks.
Origin Protocol
Origin NFT platform gives its creators incentives to sell on their platform. They include some of the more established NFT artists, such as composer and artist BT’s ‘Metaversal’ album and 3LAU’s Ultraviolet Vinyl NFT collection.
The platform allows creators and NFT projects to upload their work, choose a sales format, personalized storefronts, and resale royalties. Furthermore, no coding is required and creators only pay for minting when something is sold.
Afterthoughts
Roofstock onChain’s sale of their first-ever house as an NFT again shows the real-world use cases for NFTs. We will see more houses sold as NFTs over the coming months and years.
Finally, we must point out that these properties are not fractionalized properties, where you can buy fractional ownership represented by tokens. If you are interested in fractional investment, you can check out the article on Realt, a leading fractional ownership company, that enables you to invest in houses as a landlord and receive rent each week from the renters.
