First NFT House Auction - Spoiler: House Is In A Semi-Shitty Area

[Quijibo69]

PINELLAS COUNTY

Gulfport home could be US' first successful real estate NFT auction​

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are digital assets with their own unique value. Transactions are made using digital money.






00:0303:26









Author: Miguel Octavio
Published: 3:53 PM EST February 4, 2022
Updated: 7:01 PM EST February 4, 2022

GULFPORT, Fla. — A home in Tampa Bay is going up for auction as an NFT, a non-fungible token, and it could be — if successful — the first of its kind auction in U.S. real estate.
NFTs are digital assets with their own unique value and properties. Transactions are made using digital money, much like other forms of exchange taking place in the cryptocurrency world.

"It's an exciting venture into what possibly could be the future of real estate," said Amy Heckler, the president and broker for Heckler Realty Group.
The realty group is in charge of selling the home as an NFT. Heckler said ownership of the home through a limited liability company, or LLC, is what's being transferred over as the NFT.
Experts said think of NFTs much like one-of-a-kind collectibles like original baseball cards or original paintings that cannot be replicated.
"NFTs are digital representation," said Gabe Higgins, a Blockspaces co-founder said. "You’re able to own a digital asset that is unique."
From digital art, to video or audio clips, Higgins said pretty much anything can be sold as an NFT.

Related Articles​

• Yes, you have to pay taxes on the sale of NFTs
• What's an NFT? The concept explained in plain English

Ownership of one's NFT is then stored on a digital ledger known as the blockchain. Experts said data is stored through the blockchain which verifies the originality of the NFT.
"You can actually verify the ownership of a digital item," Higgins said. "Before, we weren't able to capture that."
Higgins said the hope is by having a unique digital asset, value for that specific NFT goes up and people can claim personal ownership to that specific NFT.
Despite growing popularity, Higgins said it's still uncertain how the market will respond to the presence of NFTs.
"It is interesting to test the waters in ways we can utilize this technology," Higgins said.
Heckler said one benefit of selling the home as an NFT is it allows for a much faster process of transferring ownership to the buyer.
The home auction takes place Tuesday. Details on the auction can be found here.

House on Google maps
Realtor.com

The only reason why I know it's Semi-Shitty area is because I know people who live around here. One house could look fine and the next could look like a house out of RE7. House insurance is super expensive in Gulfport because of flooding. Does anyone want me to explore this?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I'm about as clueless on this whole "NFT" and "cryptocurrency" thing as someone from the '00s would be.

So a "real estate NFT auction" is this bizarre future thing to me.

 

[Jordi El Nino Polla]

Who holds the deed to the property after all is said and done? Is the NFT simply being used as a means of spending crypto to do the sale? Is this as convoluted as I think it is?

 

[Neo-Nazi Rich Evans]

im not super knowledgeable on NFT, so what advantage other than storing ownership on the block chain does an NFT house sale have over a traditional sale? and how is using a blockchain an advantage here? so far it seems more like a gimmick to me.

 

[Netizennameless]

im not super knowledgeable on NFT, so what advantage other than storing ownership on the block chain does an NFT house sale have over a traditional sale? and how is using a blockchain an advantage here? so far it seems more like a gimmick to me.

Money laundering, but without the issue of getting physical items out of a country.

 

[️ronic]

Imagine getting your house stolen because someone stole your private key.

 

[Nekoi.Inukuma.00]

If this is a transfer of deed via NFT, it's weird to me that this has taken this long. I've always though idea of selling the equivalent of signed & numbered artwork prints via NFTs was the DUMBEST use for the tech. When I first heard of the idea behind NFTs and "smart contracts", I thought it would be an interesting way of recording ownership of real property, specifically real estate.

During the 2009 mortgage crisis, one of the odd side things that occurred was transfers of title lagging behind transfers of the loans. Records were lost and you wound up with houses in limbo getting foreclosed on by entities with no recorded claim to title. It should have been a bigger issue than it was, and a lot more people should have gone to jail over this retarded breakdown of the system.

But imagine: Wouldn't it be great if you had some way to record such transfers in a public, immutable way, secured by public key encryption? From a computer science standpoint, there is little more bullet proof than "I can prove I own the keys used to sign the deed for this house, let me sign this message with the same key to prove it."

Add in smart contracts: once this contract wallet hits a particular threshold of payments, transfer the deed to the designated person when paid off. You could even transfer ownership of the contract collecting the funds, or fork the contract to change the outputs of the wallet... like say if it gets subdivided into mortgage backed securities.

However, very quickly you realize, that while this is an interesting thought experiment on how to build a "better mousetrap", there are a lot of downsides that make the whole thing retarded. As someone else pointed out:

Imagine getting your house stolen because someone stole your private key.

Hell, just imagine losing your private key too a hard disk crash. Now your property is in limbo. You just turned something secured by contract and a government filing system into something you can physically lose.

You can fix that too, incorporate that into some sort of government backed identification. The keys could be cached, with a mechanism to recover your keys by proving who you are to a government agency; it could even be done biometrically. Of course, now you have biometric surveillance and a national ID.

It's not like we don't already have similar systems: In the US, if you've every had to replace your Social Security card, you've probably already experienced something like this. It's legally not allowed be used as a national ID, but that's pretty much how it is de facto used.

Which leads to a whole other dystopian nightmare: surely such an automated, on chain framework would never be abused to deny one use of your money or property if you, say, make a donation to the wrong political cause. It's bad enough the banks will cuck so easily (for a time) to a totalitarian exercising emergency powers, but imagine if the brakes of having to pressure a second entity are taken off the system. The retardation of NFT now become horrifying.


Of course, if they're just selling an NFT based on the property as some sort of collectable with no rights attached, this goes right back into the selling art print style NFTs and this story is all retarded once again.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Who holds the deed to the property after all is said and done? Is the NFT simply being used as a means of spending crypto to do the sale? Is this as convoluted as I think it is?

im not super knowledgeable on NFT, so what advantage other than storing ownership on the block chain does an NFT house sale have over a traditional sale? and how is using a blockchain an advantage here? so far it seems more like a gimmick to me.

NFTs are just contracts so it's exactly the same as a normal contract in law* except you have a timestamped record of events on a distributed ledger now so you have potentially better standing in the event of a dispute. Generally speaking the medium of an agreement doesn't matter at all* which is why a handshake or a napkin are equally valid in principle with the only issue being what you can prove in court if you need to, and they're better for that since the literal point is being timestamped indestructable cryptographic proof. A bunch of juristictions already have technically-pointless "no really guys digital contracts are real contracts" laws so once the art nft fad fucks off and stops fagging everything up you can expect it'll become pretty standard practice.

*Except that property is the ONE category that has special requirements for a deed or whatever so this is probably kinda bullshit or redundant. I ain't clicking it.