The metaverse is shaping up to be a big topic of discussion in 2022. The metaverse is a fictional, virtual world, and you can actually buy digital pieces of land in this world.

There isn’t just one metaverse. Many companies, including Meta, which was Facebook, are building their own virtual worlds. These virtual world builders hope that people will gather as digital avatars and create a place to make purchases, play games, and interact with one another.

The real estate market will include three-dimensional spaces set in virtual reality. It sounds crazy, and perhaps it is, but the following are things to know.

The Demand for Digital Property

As part of the metaverse, real estate that you can snap up includes virtual concert venues, malls, houses, and monuments. The future, at least as digital property owners see it, is one where they can then work with brands who want to have a presence in different aspects of the metaverse.

The Metaverse Group is one of the first companies to get into the business of digital real estate.

The Metaverse Group operates Decentraland, a virtual world. The parent company of the Metaverse Group, Token.com, recently announced they were selling a 116-parcel estate in the center of the Fashion Street district. They were selling it for the equivalent of around $2.5 million.

The new owner could profit if a significant brand wanted to open a store in that location. They would be their virtual landlord.

The real estate deal didn’t involve actual money. Instead, it sold for 618,000 mana. Mana is a cryptocurrency used in Decentraland.

Similarities to NFT

People are paying large amounts of money for the rights to virtual land in a world that’s not in existence, at least not entirely.

If you pay attention to cryptocurrency or NFT, however, it can sound a little less out there. People are putting massive amounts of money into digital assets.

In digital real estate, the primary way you’d be able to make money off your asset would be to rent it out or sell ad space.

Think back to the 1980s. People started building websites, and then the owners could charge fees or sell ads to make money from the sites. While it’s so common we don’t think about it now, it might have sounded pretty far-fetched at the time.

Other Companies Selling Digital Land

Decentraland isn’t the only place to go if you want to invest in virtual real estate. For example, there’s a company called Spotselfie. Currently, Spotselfie operates an augmented virtual reality app. The company is planning to soon let you buy virtual real estate associated with GPS coordinates that are in the real world.

The feature is called Spotland.

By using Spotselfie issued tokens, you can buy the rights to a radius around a certain coordinate. If Spotselfie sells ads at that location, then you can make money.

With Spotland, the metaverse is for augmented rather than virtual reality. You use your phone’s camera and point it at a real-world location. Then, Spotland creates a digital overlay onto your screen with ads.

There’s no guarantee anyone will be interested in the metaverse, but Mark Zuckerberg and others are betting on it big-time. The Facebook founder says he plans to pour billions into it over the next few years.

It could be an interesting way to be a real estate investor, although there’s plenty of criticism that comes with the concept of living within a digital space that tracks your every move.