Krista Kim’s dream home didn’t exist, so she built it herself—in the metaverse. In 2020, cooped up with her two kids in a Toronto condo during the Covid lockdown, the digital artist began designing her perfect escape, leaving no detail overlooked. She sketched out a glassed-walled bungalow villa with rugged mountain views and a serene Zen-garden layout inspired by Japan, where she lived for three years in the mid-2000s. There was an infinity pool, a walk-in closet and a tightly curated selection of light-bouncing translucent furniture. Curiously, Kim’s plan didn’t include a kitchen. An odd choice, but Mars House, as she called it, wasn’t made for everyone. “I imagined creating a house that would heal me,” she says. She also hoped she’d find a buyer. “The question was: Would anyone else understand what I was selling?”
As it turns out, someone did. Kim’s futuristic dreamscape sold for approximately US$512,000 in March of 2021. The metaverse is a loosely but increasingly understood shared virtual space, accessible via smartphone, goggles or headset—and it’s the newest frontier in the global real estate blitz. The sale of Mars House, a 3-D file rendered using the video game software Unreal Engine, marked the metaverse’s first-ever NFT-based residential transaction.
For individual users, metaverse property might function similarly to a hyper-modern Myspace—a place to “host” friends, co-work, play games and display their avatar’s fully…
