There's been a lot of chatter about real estate in the metaverse being a bigger fizzle than a flash. The truth of the matter, however, is that interest in the earliest parcels of metaverse real estate remains strong.

Decentraland (MANA -0.56%) and The Bored Ape Yacht Club's Otherside continue to have strong overall sales records, and The Sandbox (SAND -1.44%) is slowly seeing growth after a frosty crypto winter. They're all showing that interest in nonfungible token (NFT) real estate may ensure.

A problem of scale

A lot of people think that the metaverse is a nothingburger with no real interest outside of a few people with way more money than sense. Although it's still a niche market, it's one that's growing and has great upside potential, especially for business-minded virtual landowners.

The problem that many people run into when they consider this new way to transact in the virtual world is one of scale. When we think about something more familiar, such as the U.S. single-family real estate market, for example, we're looking at a pool of about 82 million homes that could be for sale at any given time. But interestingly enough, the U.S. housing market only had 6.12 million home sales in 2021, which means that only a little more than 7% of the single-family housing inventory turned over that year.

In the metaverse, there are only about 300,000 plots. That's about a third of a percent of the U.S. housing market total.

Our recent report on the state of virtual real estate shows that on Jan. 1, a pretty normal day in the metaverse, the three main platforms we track for virtual real estate in the metaverse had a total of 317 sales between The Otherside (316), The Sandbox (31), and Decentraland (24). Annualized, that's 115,705 sales or almost 39% of these plots of virtual real estate changing hands.

So, really, there's a great deal of interest for both land speculators and landowners with bigger plans.

Where the real estate action is

The Big Three of metaverse real estate platforms -- The Otherside, The Sandbox, and Decentraland -- are at different stages of development, which can make it kind of difficult to compare their sales activity head to head. But strictly from the numbers, you probably can expect the most trading activity happening in The Otherside.

There's a reason for this. The Otherside is in a pre-release stage, where landowners can't visit their land or do anything useful with it yet except buy and sell.

Although The Bored Ape Yacht Club has made it clear that owners will be able to commercialize their properties, as of now, nothing can happen on the platform because it's not finished. This means a lot of people are still speculating on those properties and doing a lot of swapping of these real estate NFTs.

The Sandbox and Decentraland are running kind of neck and neck on transactions, but many of the land parcels are being taken more or less permanently out of circulation by people who are actually using them.

The Sandbox is not fully operational yet, but owners can build properties and renters can negotiate lease/build contracts with larger landholders. Decentraland has been fully operational for a while, and brands and landlords have been aggressively picking up properties they can use to establish a permanent face for their brand or base for their businesses.

The metaverse is an active place for real estate sales

Although the metaverse has plenty of real estate transactions and we can quantify the sales numbers, it's much harder to track other kinds of transactions like rentals or those build-to-lease contracts that have become increasingly popular.

Investors who have been wondering if the metaverse is nothing more than smoke and mirrors may be interested to see just how much money is changing hands on any given day. For example, The Otherside had a total of $902,000 worth of real estate traded on Jan. 1.

Sales are one way to gauge investor interest. Another is market cap, which even after the onset of the crypto winter, is significant. ApeCoin (APE 0.75%), one of two coins used in The Otherside, is at about $1.5 billion, Decentraland's MANA is at $1.1 billion and The Sandbox's SAND token is almost $1 billion.

Although we're very likely well past the post-Meta name-change bubble, there's a lot of value in metaverse real estate and a lot of potential value that can be created from activities beyond basic land speculation. The activity is there, there's very serious, real money being spent, and there are more brands and companies joining the ranks of the metaverse-curious every month.