Hey, guys! Welcome back to yet another Saturday edition of Meta Money
here with Ben on the BitBoy Crypto channel.
We got a fun one planned today, don't we?
Yeah, Web3 is disrupting every industry.
We're trying to get ahead of the game and figure out what that is.
Last week, we kind of talked about fitness and stuff.
This week, we want to talk about real estate.
Is the market going to crash?
Interest rates going up.
Is there going to be a bubble?
- And-- - The bubble is popping!
Should we diversify into, like, digital land as well?
I don't know. That's where we're going today.
- Let's see. Let's what we'll get. - Yeah.
Well, let's go there.
Let's go there with real estate.
- So-- - Yeah.
I think that, you know,
one of our most lucrative things we've done as a company is buy digital real estate.
We have digital real estate in several different metaverses.
- Obviously Sandbox. We're whales over there. - Yup.
Everdome. We just announced we're moving into Everdome.
We bought some property there.
- So that's exciting. - Let's go!
- And we got three or four other ones that-- - Nice! - Victoria VR
- We've got-- - Victoria VR. Exactly.
I think we're like one of the largest private landowners in Victoria VR.
I love it, man. That's how you do it.
And so I think buying land is really good.
But I think that really what's interesting to me is that, like,
there's nothing being disrupted here, right?
- Like, not-- - It's just a fresh start.
Yes. It's brand new.
There's no metaverse to disrupt. This is it.
- Well-- - What I think is really interesting, though, is
regular real estate getting disrupted by web.
- That's what I'm talking about. - Yes.
Yes. How is that going to look?
- And I think we're a little ways out from that. - Oh, yeah.
But you can almost take everything you learned from buying digital land
to, now, once the technology goes over to the physical real estate,
you could use that to, like, as your schooling.
Like, the metaverse.
Because you'll eventually be able to buy physical real estate in a group of people.
- Yeah. - Or with a DAO or fractional investing.
Or even just by yourself.
- I mean, now to buy real estate, - Yeah.
- you either have to work with an agent - Right.
- or you have to go get a license to be an agent. - Yeah.
But with Web3 and digital, the metaverse,
I can just go onto my computer, spend some Bitcoin, some Ethereum, whatever,
and now I'm a landowner.
And I didn't have to ask anybody for permission.
- I'm going to ruffle some feathers here. - Do it.
I'm going to ruffle some feathers.
I hate real estate agents.
Well, of course!
Look, I know a lot of you--
I know a lot of you are real estate agents.
And I want you to understand I don't hate you.
- I have a real-- - The idea of it.
I have a real estate agent, Laura.
- She's helped me tremendously with stuff. - She helped me buy my house.
She helped you buy your house.
And then we have Kathy that, you know, has helped us.
She helped us get this building.
She helped us with a lot of other real estate stuff.
We do things in real estate.
But I have had transactions before that I'm sitting there like,
"Why am I paying this person for this?"
You know? And I think that
- a lot of people have that frustration. - Yeah.
Is that why do we have a system where someone has to have a license
to be able to organize the sale of something?
Well, it's the middleman syndrome.
- You see it in a lot of things, right? - It is. It is.
And once again, if you're a real estate agent,
- we love you. You're great. - We love you.
- We love you. - Do you hate brokers and just--
- like, anyone that brokers anything? - Yes, I hate middlemen!
- I hate middlemen. - Okay.
- I hate middlemen. - Bryan's a middleman right now.
Yeah. We call him the pivot guy.
I was like, "What are you talking about? Oh, yeah, obviously."
- We call him the pivot guy. - Oh, God.
So I think that, like, it's one of those things where--
look.
Truck drivers, right?
Like, you look at truck drivers.
We love truck drivers.
We support truck drivers. They're great.
I'm sorry. In 20 years, you're not going to have a job.
Everything is going to be ran in a different way in 20 years.
And we look at truck driving, and we say it's very obvious
that it's moving towards automation and AI and self-driving.
There'll be some people that disagree with that.
But when you look at real estate,
it's the same thing!
- Like, we don't need the middlemen. - Absolutely.
- Once it's on the blockchain. - Once it's on the blockchain.
- It's secure. It's verified. - Yes.
There's no title guarantee company.
- There's no-- it's all there. - Right.
It's the digital-- you own your own.
It's digital ownership.
- That's the most exciting part for me about it. - Yes.
And that's-- when we went to Sacramento,
that's what they're looking at doing over there in California is
moving all the land deeds over to blockchain.
It's all transparent.
And you want to think about like decentralized web applications, for instance.
Well, like, Zillow is centralized, right?
Well, all the real estate agents,
they hate Zillow because they overinflate the prices
because the company, like, wants to give people higher valuations
and then they can come in and buy things at different prices.
- There's a lot of factors why Zillow gives prices that are too high. - Right.
- Your house is a-- - Zillow is sharks.
- Like, you know what they did, right? - Yes.
- Well, I've heard but, yeah, you want to explain? - I mean, they just basic--
No. I mean they just basically said that
this is going to be the site for all real estate agents to use
and then they just ended up the ones taking all the business
and marketing all the houses,
- negating the use of real estate agents. - Yes.
Exactly. So, you know, but, once again, they're still middlemen.
- Right. - You know?
Well, but think about this.
Think about we move--
we move all land assessments and land deeds over to blockchain.
Now, you have a verifiable ownership history of this is how much it was appraised for,
this is how much it sold for, this was the transaction,
this is who owns it.
And now all that data feeds into a decentralized application
- that gives you the real raw numbers. - Yeah.
The real raw numbers of what a house should be priced at,
what are some comps in the area that just sold.
Because let me tell you.
One thing that I hate way more than real estate agents
are the land appraisers.
If you want to talk about a racket and a scheme,
the land appraisers are the worst of all!
- They can-- yes. - If they're having a bad day,
- your house is not valued for what you want. - 100%
You don't get along with them? You got a personality conflict?
- Sorry, Bud. That could be 30 grand. - Yeah.
So a house that I bought, my first house that I own, in Gainesville, in North Georgia,
I bought this house and I had an agreement with the guy that I bought it from
that we were going to rent it for six months
because I was basically waiting on two years of tax returns from my business
- to be able to show and get a loan, right? - Right.
So we had an agreed upon price.
Well, the appraiser came in and appraised it for less than the agreed upon price,
which the agreed upon price was definitely a fair price.
And when you will come to the area,
the appraiser took comps in the area that didn't actually match my house
and came up with a lower valuation.
So I had to put $10,000 cash on top of the down payment
to cover the agreement I made with the guy I bought it from
because the mortgage company wouldn't cover it.
- Yeah. Right. - And it was--
no one who ever would see this house
would say it should have went for what they appraised it for.
- So being able to-- - Right.
it's not just when people hear middlemen and cutting out middlemen,
like, they tend to think like, "Oh, well, people lose jobs. It's kind of sad," whatever.
But the real truth is here,
when we're using decentralized numbers,
- we take out the errors and the fallacies - Yeah.
in which people get these fake overinflated prices or underinflated prices.
And we get raw numbers.
And then we get to make the decision on whether it's accurate or not.
Or it feels it's a good deal or not.
Now, do you see-- now, we see this with, like, NFT and stuff.
- You got private sales, right? - Yeah.
Where, alright, you've got an NFT that I want,
and so I don't need to go through OpenSea or JPG Store or LooksRare, whatever.
We just do a deal back and forth to each other.
- Right? - Yeah.
- And you sell your NFT to me, and I send you the crypto. - Yeah.
Now, there's no transaction history other than the fact that it transferred from you to me.
- How does that get affected in this industry, though? - Yeah.
Yeah. And there's also the negative of-- alright. So in the NFT world,
people will buy NFTs from themselves,
- essentially inflating the price, - Wash trading.
making it-- wash trading--
making it look like it's hotter than it is.
So I think we'll still--
maybe it's not middlemen, but you'll need some kind of experts or researchers
to be able to research the chain data, see if this is actually going right in this area.
Well, I think when you look at house sales, right?
You look at all the paperwork that has to go behind that.
You're still going to need all the same paperwork.
You're just not going to have to have someone necessarily with license to do it.
When you're talking about NFTs, I mean, you are talking about,
you do need a platform that brings it all together.
Because, yes, I can do it peer-to-peer,
and there are a lot of people that do do it peer-to-peer,
but for tax purposes,
- it's a lot easier to do it on a platform, so. - That's a good point.
And I think that's something that factors into this.
Like, what is going to be better for taxes all the way around?
So I--
Here's the way I view middlemen, okay?
They're always going to move to the next thing.
So, right? You got realtors.
Like, maybe we don't need realtors down the road for whatever reason we're moving at.
People are able to do things direct, you know?
Or maybe through a platform even without having to have the individual,
you know, person come in there and help you with it.
- And sometimes it feels like hold you hostage. - Yeah
- For their 6% or 3% on, you know-- - For 6% or 3%, whatever it is.
And I do think there's a lot of realtors that are going to get in big trouble here in the next few years
because they just keep telling everybody that housing market is going up forever.
Right. Well, we know it's not.
Guys, housing market does not go up forever.
It's every other market. They're cyclical.
- They have to go up to go down. - They tell you the fundamentals are strong.
And I think it's important to understand
that it's not that realtors are trying to be evil people and they're not trying--
yes, they are motivated by money to keep you buying,
but also realtors are in an echo chamber of other realtors
who are telling them the same thing.
If you look at Ben Bernanke in 2007, he said, "The housing market is strong."
Why?
"Good fundamentals."
- Well, we saw what happened in 2008. - We saw what happened in 2008.
And we're going to see something similar whether it's this year, next year or two years,
whatever it's going to be.
But basically realtors will find some other way to still be involved in the home buying process,
whether it's consulting
or whether it's helping people figure out the right taxes or the right way to do stuff.
So, I kind of feel bad I said I hate realtors.
- No, no, no, no. - There was a moment.
Let me explain that a little bit.
There was a moment where I was selling a house,
and it was just like-- I felt like I was paying this person for absolutely nothing.
We were overpromised.
We were underdelivered.
And it just gave--
and we were at a very pivotal point in our financial life at that point,
and it just-- it gave me a really bad taste in my mouth for it.
And I was like, "What did I pay for?"
- Like, "I could have done this myself." - Right.
And so I had a really great experience with realtors,
I had some bad experiences, just like anything else.
But I think if you are a realtor, you really need to dig in.
- Look. Virtual realtors. - Yeah.
- You know? - It's coming.
- It's coming. - People that had become experts in different areas.
I just want to say this though, like,
over on Meta Money,
we're talking about how the metaverse and how Web3 is going to disrupt
- all these industries, right? - Yeah.
And it's very important. Anybody watching this that
if you're an expert in something,
whether it's real estate, fitness, tech, whatever that is,
- figure out how your expertise is going to change because of Web3 - Absolutely.
and get involved now.
Because that's how you position yourself ahead of the game,
ahead of these other people and how you make a bunch of money.
- Yeah. - We always preach getting early. Always.
And that's what we're doing here, you know?
Like, we've got so many things coming that people don't know that we're doing.
We're trying to position ourselves in the business of blockchain,
- not just in the videos of blockchain or crypto education. - Yeah.
- That's something we're very focused on. - Yeah.
Metaverse education, like you guys do.
But you've got to figure out ways on the back and to take advantage of all this extra knowledge
- that we have that other people don't have. - Yeah.
Speaking of taking advantage,
this is now your time to take advantage of that like button.
Also, head on over to Meta Money.
- Make sure that you're subscribed there, - Smash it.
and we will see you next weekend for some more Saturday morning metaverse with Ben.
That's right.