Over the last few years, Real Estate market in India has witnessed a massive change in terms of technological disruptions. Technology in real estate, which was largely confined to listing commercial and residential properties, is now impacting almost every aspect of the industry. The technological advancements have completely revolutionized the realty sector. Virtual home tours, digital property signing deals and other PropTech trends are gaining momentum significantly in the post-COVID era. With the current acceleration in tech adoption, metaverse has become a popular phenomenon across the globe and real estate metaverse is now a talk of the town.
What is metaverse?
In simple words, metaverse is a blend of physical, augmented, and virtual realities. It creates a virtual ecosystem, just like the replica of real world, where people can interact, play and communicate through a digital medium. Metaverse can be transactional in nature with the cryptocurrency being rolled out in the market. The sole purpose behind the rise of metaverse is to paving the way for next-level social connectedness.
If we look into the stats, according to the reports of Bloomberg Intelligence, the metaverse market is expected to reach US$800 billion by 2025 and might touch US$2.5 trillion by 2030.
Transformation of Real Estate Industry
Out of all the high-end investments, virtual real estate is capturing the attention of the investors in the recent times. A huge rise has been seen in the global interest in real estate metaverse. Today, there are many platforms offering opportunities to buy properties with the help of digital wallets. One of the biggest advantages of this is that people can buy land as non-fungible tokens (NFT) using cryptocurrencies. The interested buyers can simply choose a property and purchase it by linking their e-wallets to the platform. The purchased virtual land can further be sold out through a third-party exchange or the metaverse ecosystem.
As the real estate metaverse has already piqued the interest of crypto buyers, several big corporates, brands, eminent personalities, and other investors are also catching up with the trend to survive in the tech-driven era.
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Is India ready to accept Real Estate Metaverse?
As mentioned above, several big investors and corporate companies across the world have already started investing in cryptocurrencies which is a big part of metaverse ecosystem but in India the term “Metaverse” is relatively a new phenomenon.
Before moving towards the big picture, there are some major pain points that needs to be highlighted:
Transparency: For the Indian buyers, the anonymity of crypto’s origin is likely to be a drawback. Moreover, crypto market is highly volatile, which was evident from the sudden drops and profound highs that the industry saw in the last couple of years.
Regulations: According to the union budget 2022-23, the Indian government has imposed 30% capital gains tax on all cryptocurrency transactions and a 1% TDS. Though the action acknowledges cryptocurrency as a valid ecosystem, the higher rate of taxes has eventually led to the determent in investment activity.
Depending on how things are going currently, we might be spending a large part of our working hours in the metaverse. However, to make the metaverse a reality beyond the gaming, the companies will need to adapt the emerging concepts like AR/VR and develop new ways to promote it to reach a broader audience.
As far as the real estate sector is concerned, metaverse is still a new trend but it will definitely unlock the new doors for the investors which would give them better opportunities to grow.