Although bitcoin transactions are rare, they are starting to make their way into the real estate market.
Earlier this year, taking real estate purchases in the Lone Star state to a new level, Kuper Sotheby's International Realty said it finalized the first-ever home in Texas that was purchased entirely with the cryptocurrency, bitcoin.
HousingWire wrote an article back in August 2014 on the most expensive bitcoin real estate purchase to date, which was in a posh Lake Tahoe, California community. The community broke the record with a land sale for $1.6 million in bitcoin.
Now, even renters can use bitcoin for their home as ManageGo, a Brooklyn, New York-based rental platform that offers landlords and tenants payment and maintenance scheduling services, is adding bitcoin to its list of payment options, according to an article by Diana Olick for CNBC. The new service will become available starting next year.
From the article:
Here's how it works: The tenant uses bitcoin and then ManageGo converts the bitcoin to dollars using Coinbase, a digital cryptocurrency broker. The landlord gets the rent payment in dollars. Since bitcoin is extremely volatile, the value is locked in at the time of the payment.
For those new to digital currency, Bitcoins are a long series of incredibly complex, military-grade encrypted alphanumeric characters that can be stored on a piece of paper, in a digital wallet or on an individual computer.
Bitcoin is subject to wild fluctuations in value as its value is based purely on supply and demand, unlike the dollar and other national currencies that have fiat value.
Currently, one bitcoin is valued at $9,550.
