By Anushree Dave
Will NFTs make home-buying easier or complicate the process?
Last week, Roofstock, a digital real estate platform, facilitated the sale of a $175,000 home in South Carolina through a non-fungible token, prompting a debate over whether the technology smooths the property-buying process or complicates it.
Roofstock onChain, which is the Web3 subsidiary of the company, listed the property on its NFT marketplace powered by Origin Protocol (many incorrectly believed it was OpenSea.) It sold using USDC, a stablecoin.
“Instead of waiting months for underwriting, appraisals, title searches and preparing deeds, I was able to buy a fully title-insured, rent-ready property with one click,” the buyer of the property, Adam Slipakoff, had said in a statement.
But as news spread about the event, questions emerged. One tweet that got a lot of attention questioned who really owns the property, and whether the token holder owns just the token or the property as well.
“For the property itself, the title is an LLC, and all we’ve done with the NFT here is that the NFT represents the sole ownership of that LLC,” said Sanjay Raghavan, the head of Web3 initiatives at Roofstock, in an interview with MarketWatch. “People have bought and sold properties through LLCs forever, right? That’s not new. All we did was make it easy to sell that LLC from person A to person B.”
Raghavan added that the operating agreement of the LLC contains language that says the owner of the token is also the owner of the house, so it’s legally established in the LLC operating agreement.
But to others, the explanation only raises questions regarding security.
“What if someone steals the NFT from a blockchain?” asked Sean Scapellato, a real estate attorney in South Carolina. “I don’t know how you handle someone knocking on your door saying they bought your NFT and the house now belongs to them.”
Hacks are less of an issue when the owner of the NFT isn’t…
