By Debra Kamin | The New York Times
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 a project that blends the line between physical and digital to the furthest extent that I could on a residential home,” Mr. Sierra said of the house, called Meta Residence One. “It pairs a real-world build and expands on it in the digital space. As these technologies get more immersive, it’s going to make a lot more sense.”
Much like real-world real estate, where pricing fluctuates according to the principle of supply and demand, metaverse real estate also operates on a fixed scale. The internet itself may be boundless, but most virtual gaming universes have already been sliced and diced into a set number of parcels, meaning as the number of buyers increases, prices go up as well.
“Our metaverse team has helped a number of terrestrial homebuilders evaluate a metaverse roll out. The metaverse can allow for a more efficient and interactive home buying experience for the home you’ll actually live and allows for some unique add on opportunities, with digital twins and creative customization in a metaverse community. It’s the future and homebuilders can really capitalize on being first to the market.”
Jordan Rose, president and founder of Rose Law Group, which is also the first full-service law firm on the metaverse for metaverse based businesses
