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Bitcoiner Behind 20Mission Co-Living Space Tries Auctioning 75-Year San Francisco Lease as NFT
Some say the Bay Area housing market is a bubble. Others claim the NFT market is ready to pop. What happens when you combine them?
By Danny Nelson
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 12:48 p.m. Published Apr 29, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
Early bitcoiner Jered Kenna can't believe that forgettable digital artifacts – “a YouTube video or a picture or whatever” – have sold for millions in this year's frothy market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). He is now auctioning an NFT with a little more “meat” from a market just as crazy: San Francisco housing.
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Kenna is selling the rights to a 75-year lease in his 20Mission co-living space as an NFT. Whoever wins the auction will pay $1 a month and no utility fees in a 41-unit building in the Mission District, where tenants regularly pay up to $2,200 in monthly rent, he said.
The effort is an example of NFTs potentially transcending the world of digital tchotchkes for more “real-world” use cases.
“Now, if somebody wants to pay a million for it, I don't think that's unreasonable,” Kenna said, arguing NFT-linked leases offer advantages in liquidity and transferability. “I think there's some serious value here, but not because it's an NFT.”
Read more: Purse Opens Nakamoto’s, San Francisco’s Bitcoin-Only Retail Shop
Kenna said NFTs could give tenants more opportunities to transfer their leases. Furthermore, the technology allows him to perpetually collect a slice of secondary deals. He said he placed the baked-in smart contract royalty at 1%.
“One percent on a property transfer is nothing. I mean people are putting 10%, 20% royalties on a picture,” he said.
When asked for comment, McKenna Brink Signorotti LLP, a California real estate law firm and counsel to 20Mission, said: "By tokenizing physical, non-virtual real estate, the real estate landscape we have come to know will be revolutionized."
Whether prospective tenants find a 75-year NFT lease reasonable at any price will soon become apparent: Bidding begins next week on the OpenSea marketplace.
There’s no direct precedent for such a rental arrangement, although at least one real estate broker who tried to sell his house on OpenSea earlier this month completely whiffed. He didn’t garner a single bid, according to CNN.
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