Is Apple’s Headset the Key to Reviving the Dream of Metaverse Real Estate?

Last week, Apple debuted its Vision Pro headset, combining virtual and augmented reality, and the response has been mostly positive. Despite occasional images of people looking silly while wearing them, most users have shared their positive experiences, leading to an increase in Apple’s stock price due to the positive reception.

There have already been announcements that a metaverse is being developed for Vision Pro, a digital universe where players can interact and even transact with each other. The company developing this metaverse, Victoria VR, has seen its token prices jump, similar to the speculative gold rush that occurred with digital real estate when the first metaverse marketplaces launched in the early 2020s.

When the concept of real estate in the metaverse emerged, there was much discussion about it being “the next Bitcoin.” Many of the people who had made a fortune on crypto were driving up prices for digital properties. People were paying large sums for parcels in metaverses like The Sandbox, Otherside, and Decentraland. However, the lasting appeal of most of these virtual worlds has not justified those prices. In 2022, someone paid $450,000 for a virtual house in The Sandbox next to rapper Snoop Dogg’s digital mansion. Now parcels in the same universe are going for a few hundred dollars.

The real estate industry followed the hype, with brokerages starting selling metaverse real estate, and eXp Realty even developing their own metaverse to connect its worldwide network of agents.

One reason why metaverses haven’t achieved the popularity developers anticipated is that they haven’t become spaces where users want to spend significant amounts of time. The daily user count across all well-known metaverse platforms remains substantially lower than initial levels during the peak of early excitement. Back in 2022, The Sandbox was reported to have fewer than one thousand active daily users. Additionally, Decentraland’s “Fashion Week” last year attracted over 60 brands to sell their digital clothing, but there were very few buyers interested in purchasing them.

Apple has the potential to change the game in the metaverse market. By creating an engaging digital universe accessible through its headset, Apple could lay the foundation for a metaverse with genuinely valuable real estate. Despite this potential, there are reasons to remain cautious about investing in digital property. As Mark Cuban pointed out, digital real estate might not hold as much value as a URL due to the limitless nature of the space that can be created. But given Apple’s track record of creating some of the most sought-after electronics globally, the digital real estate in its metaverse may possess a more enduring appeal in this next phase.