First Home Sale in US using NFT’s

Last week, we discussed smart contracts and alluded to their endless potential use cases. Since that article, Tampa Bay made history as it became home to the very first home sale using NFT’s in the United States. As we covered last week, an NFT is a smart contract and this is yet another industry soon to be revolutionized by this technology.

Propy is a silicon valley based real estate company working to streamline and automate the closing process for all participants to make closing faster, easier, and more secure. Their products helps brokers, agents and title companies migrate to a paperless remote closing. Natalia Karayaneva, the CEO and founder of Propy, a real estate professional for 15 years, was frustrated with how time-consuming and rife with fraud real estate transactions were.

Propy was built with the vision to automate the real estate sales process. “We truly feel that we made history, both for the real estate industry and for the crypto community,” said Natalia after Thursday’s NFT/real estate auction. The five-bedroom, three-and-half-bath house sold for 210 Ether, the equivalent of $653,000 at the time of the sale, according to Propy.

The first step involved transferring ownership of the house from the seller to a limited liability company. After the auction winner was determined, ownership of the LLC, which was controlled by the NFT smart contract was automatically transferred to the winner and the seller received the crypto payment in her digital wallet. Propy’s legal team came up with the LLC maneuver so the ownership transfer could be instantaneous. The usual due diligence processes that come with buying a home, like completing an inspection, obtaining a title report, and conducting a title search, were done by Propy before the auction. The seller was Leslie Alessandra, the founder of Defi Unlimited, a Tampa area–based blockchain company.

Propy seems to just be getting started and has it’s sights set on transforming the Real Estate Industry. To expand the potential pool of buyers, Karayaneva said in the future Propy also plans to allow buyers to take out mortgages through its technology in USDC, a stablecoin whose price is pegged to the U.S. dollar. As it is, buyers must pay up front in full, without a mortgage, significantly limiting the number of bidders.

This is just the beginning and since it was in our own city, and just happened last Thursday, we thought that we should give space in this series for an exciting real world use case for smart contracts.