Real estate just became less real in one corner of Los Angeles.
A Hollywood Hills mansion with a private non-fungible token (NFT) art installation has sold for $14.9 million. The sale is the latest to highlight an overlap between digital art and real estate, a development that started with the $500,000 sale of the world’s first NFT house in March.
The latest deal came at 1250 Hilldale Avenue, a four-bedroom, six-bath mansion with views of Downtown Los Angeles. The 9,418-square property, designed by architect Hagy Belzberg, was first listed in July with an asking price of $18 million, according to a listing from Zillow. The price was cut to $17 million a month after. It went into contract in late September.
The transaction is not the first to combine NFTs with a tangible real estate asset. In April, 221 Dryden Street, a four-bedroom home in Thousand Oaks, was put on the market with an NFT video of the home. The house and the video went into auction on NFT platform OpenSea with a starting bid of $117,000. That attempt at marrying NFT and real estate has yet to bear fruit. According to Zillow, the home was taken off the market in May with an asking price of $1.2 million.
The transaction for the first NFT house – a digital representation – also wasn’t clear of hitches. The artist and the 3D-modeller for the digital property, called the Mars House, sank into a copyright dispute.
The appeal of NFTs in real estate goes beyond property deals. In February, Argentinian designer Andres Reisinger sold ten virtual pieces of virtual furniture in an NFT auction for a total of $450,000. A month later, 3D artist Alexis Christodoulou made $340,000 from the sale of NFT renderings.
The seller of the Hollywood Hills home is BW Partners III, LLC, a California entity managed by Colossal Property Group President Phillip Braunstein, property records show. The buyer was not disclosed. The Agency, the brokerage firm that handled the listing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.