TechCrunch Founder, Michael Arrington’s Kyiv Apartment makes history once again as property sells for nearly 5x starting bid.
June 9th, 2021, San Francisco, CA − Propy, the world’s leading real estate industry innovator in transaction automation using blockchain technology, successfully minted and auctioned the first real estate NFT.
The apartment, which was the first property to be sold using blockchain technology back in 2017, was owned by Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch and Arrington XRP Capital. Arrington decided to sell the apartment (located in Kyiv, Ukraine) as an NFT to further showcase the power of blockchain technology to innovate the real estate industry.
“I’m very excited to have bought the first real-estate NFT from Michael Arrington with Propy,”
says new owner, Devon Bernard.
“This historic property will be the first of many, as crypto evolves the real estate industry.”
“I’m thrilled with the results of the auction and the work our partners and our team did to bring this project to fruition. It’s a major milestone in leveraging the promise of blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFT) to achieve self-driving real estate transactions.”
– Natalia Karayaneva, CEO of Propy.
In order to sell the apartment as an NFT, the process operated slightly differently than a traditional real estate sale. The ownership of the property was actually held and recorded in Ukraine as a US LLC. The auction winner became the owner of the NFT that gives the rights to the LLC, with Arrington signing proprietary-developed legal papers for NFTs to transfer ownership to all future buyers. Propy developed the smart contracts, the legal framework that is suitable for the US market and will soon launch a real estate NFT auction platform for the upcoming NFTs. Thus agents and consumers can choose between Propy Offers solution to make normal offers, and NFT auction to make public offers. For this particular auction Propy partnered with the Seen Haus to conduct the bidding and Helio Lending to secure financing to future real estate NFT owners.
“The benefits of this type of ownership are groundbreaking,”
says Varun Bajaj a real estate attorney and cryptocurrency expert.
“Future ownership can now be transferred instantly on the blockchain by anyone, anywhere – it truly is an example of global, peer-to-peer financing.”
Propy has plans to handle more NFT property sales in the future.
“Over 100 people have reached out to us to sell their properties, and we’re excited to help them.”
says Karayaneva
Details about the sale can be found here.
Propy is backed by blockchain investor Tim Draper, and has helped thousands of agents and homebuyers make offers and complete over $1bn worth of transactions via their easy-to-use and secure online and on-chain platform.
About Propy
Propy is a leading innovator in the real estate industry, building self-driving transactions. Propy makes property purchase transactions easier by bringing agents and consumers together in a secure environment. Propy Offers help agents and consumers win offers; and Propy Transaction Platform enables agents, consumers and title companies to easily manage all phases of a sale online. Purchase offers, payments and deeds are processed on the immutable blockchain. Worldwide, the company has assisted in over 1,000 real estate transfers. Closing deals via NFT-ing property ownership can ease the life of the consumer and the agent and unlock the equity liquidity. Learn more at Propy.com
