If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve read or heard about the record price that Vignesh Sundaresan paid for Beeple’s NFT and the Christies auction that fetched $69 Million. Jeff Koons and David Hockney are the only other living artists who have sold their artwork for more. Since that sale, there have been an onslaught of other record-breaking NFT sales like Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet for $2.9M and Ramírez-Mallis selling his farts (seriously) for $85 a pop. Most people are still trying to figure out WTF an NFT is – let alone why on earth someone would pay such a high price for something that is intangible.
An NFT is a unique bit of digital code that is stored on the Ethereum blockchain and refers to a 14-megabyte graphic of the column hosted on a decentralized file hosting service. Still, sounds complicated? The most important part of an NFT is that it cannot be duplicated or counterfeited, making it potentially valuable for collectors. In other words, it is the only one of its kind and cannot be replicated. It is guaranteed authentic. Authenticity is the latest buzzword in every branding meeting I have. If you can effectively and credibly communicate authenticity, you win your client’s trust. One of my first clients in real estate once paid me the compliment that “I was such a good salesman because I was such a bad bullshitter”. He valued my honesty.
People crave authenticity. This latest NFT craze is a clear sign from the market that people are starved for guaranteed authenticity and will pay a premium for it. The art world has been filled with fakery and con artists who have gone to extreme lengths to fool the world and blur the lines between what is authentic and what is fake. Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo’s book “Provenance” is one of the most remarkable stories about such a man. (A must-read). But the art world isn’t alone in this type of behavior. The books and stories on real estate con artists are numerous. (“Liars Ball” and “Billion Dollar Whale” are two that come to mind).
Real estate agents have built a reputation of blurring the lines between being honest/authentic, or saying whatever they feel the client needs to hear to get a deal done. It is becoming more and more difficult for a client to know who is authentic. All you need to do is look at some of the Instagram accounts of some “top” real estate agents. Beyond the self-proclaimed successes of their fictitious sales numbers, there is no real regulation, oversight, or rules of engagement. This is very upsetting to a lot of my peers in the industry who have built their businesses the “old-fashioned way” but I’m confident that time will sort this out. Our reputations are our currency and these built over time, not over social media. Until there is an NFT for real estate agents, people will have to use their own filter to sift through the bullshit and rely on reputation, trust, and experience.
Let’s do this!
-Shaun