Metaverse real estate sales top $500 million and are projected to double in 2022

A new era of the Internet is upon us and the metaverse is here to change the internet as we know it. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, the ‘metaverse’ is now the latest buzzword in technology and among the Silicon Valley elites.

Metaverse started dominating the headlines back in October 2021 after Facebook announced it was changing its rebranding to Meta to reflect its focus on the metaverse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said that the tech giant has committed $10 billion to transition from its much-criticized social network and related family of apps into what Zuckerberg describes as an “embodied internet.”

Since then, thousands, if not millions of users are already buying and selling in the metaverse. One of the biggest areas is real estate. Last November, metaverse startup Decentraland announced it sold a patch of virtual real estate in the online world for a record $2.43 million worth of cryptocurrency, making it the world’s most expensive virtual real estate.

As the metaverse real estate race heats up, another metaverse investor paid $450,000 for a piece of land just to be Snoop Dogg’s next-door neighbor. The announcement came just a month after Snoop Dogg, a rapper turned tech investor, launched his own metaverse called Snoop Verse on The Sandbox,  a virtual Metaverse where players can play, build, own, and monetize their virtual experiences. However, it didn’t take long before one of his fans paid $450,000 to become Snoop Dogg’s metaverse next-door neighbor.

The fan, an NFT collector who also goes by the name P-Ape, purchased a digital plot of metaverse land in Snoop Dogg’s new virtual world, Snoopverse, for $450,000 on December 3. In response to P-Ape’s purchase, Snoop tweeted, “Won’t u be my neighbor.”

Today, sales of real estate in the metaverse reportedly topped $500 million last year and could potentially double this year, according to investors and analytics firms. Metaverse data provider, MetaMetric Solutions told CNBC that real estate sales on the four major metaverse platforms reached $501 million in 2021. So far this month, metaverse real estate sales topped $85 million, MetaMetric Solutions. The metaverse data provider also projects that at this pace sales could reach nearly $1 billion this year.

Meanwhile, another report from BrandEssence Market Research found that the metaverse real estate market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 31% a year from 2022 to 2028.

The term metaverse, short for “meta-universe,” was originally coined by Neal Stephenson in the dystopian novel “Snow Crash” three decades ago. In the book, Stephenson describes the metaverse as a three-dimensional virtual reality generated by goggles worn by the novel’s hero, Hiro.

Metaverse is a digital world where the real and virtual worlds converge into a vision of science fiction. You can also think of the metaverse as a virtual world where millions of people could gather to work, play, and socialize in immersive virtual environments and communicate across shared spaces across different platforms.