An industry report revealed that real estate deals in the Metaverse exceeded $500 million in 2021, The numbers were relatively low at the beginning of the year, but meteorically shot up towards the end after Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta to focus on building the metaverse. 

While companies like Meta, Chinese search giant Baidu and even Microsoft have demonstrated their vision of the metaverse, it is the less known names in the tech world, such as Decentraland, Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium that have seen the bulk of sales, the report said. 

CNBC also cited another report from Republic Realm to confirm that Sandbox accounted for three-quarters of all real estate sales in the metaverse, with the platform providing a little over 60 percent of the options for interested buyers. Decentraland is a distant second in the number of land parcels that it offers, however, its 172 square feet (16 sq m) parcels are priced much higher than 1000 square feet (96 sq m) parcels of Sandbox.

Along with these land parcels that are likely to be utilized to host virtual events in the metaverse, there are also other iconic venues such as Megayachts that have also been sold for whopping figures in the past year. The rush to get hands-on prime property might be easy to understand in the real world but tricky in a world where one could log in from any part of the globe in absolutely no time.

The scarcity of prime property is only artificial in the metaverse, where new worlds could be built or simply replicated by copying lines of code. Nevertheless, the valuation of real estate in the metaverse is still ascending. Private villas called Fantasy Islands made by Republic Realm that fetched $15,000 at their launch are now worth $100,000.

The trend is likely to continue not only in 2022, when the sales are estimated to double and cross the one billion figure, but also continue through 2028, as the real estate market in the metaverse is expected to compound at an annual rate of 31 percent.