by Michael Bodbly
With US single-family home values hovering in a middle-of-the-road range on a year-over-year basis, crypto companies are looking to carve out a slice of the US real estate pie — even as digital assets themselves remain deeply depressed over that same period.
In the latest instance, fintech and single family-focused sales company Roofstock has sold off a Georgia home to RealT via a tokenized Ethereum-based NFT, representatives for both companies told Blockworks on Tuesday. It marked the first collaboration between the two companies.
The first round of the transaction was facilitated by OpenSea, with RealT imposing “heavy restrictions” around the float of the initial fractionalization offering, according to Remy Jacobson, the co-founder at RealT and one of two chief executives at the businesses. A second round will follow later.
It’s not the first such instance of an NFT-enabled property sale for Roofstock, which has a Web3-focused division that aims to make inroads into the property sector.
The process is similar to Roofstock’s previous tokenized real estate sale of a home in Alabama last month.
“RealT acquires properties sourced by Roofstock into C-Corps which then sell tokenized shares to investors,” the spokesperson said in an additional statement. The idea is to use the tokenized equities that originated in the US to provide blockchain-based exposure to investors in other countries.
