Bitcoin has landed in San Francisco Bay Area real estate, according to Roh Habibi, founder of the Habibi Group and star of the #1 real estate television show, Million Dollar Listing San Francisco, airing on Bravo and viewed by some 25M people in 140 countries.
If anyone ought to know about bitcoin in Bay Area real estate, it’s Habibi. Fluent in English, Farsi, Dari, Arabic and Spanish, Habibi’s real estate firm serves an international clientele of investors, developers and clients involved with opulent re-sales, ground up development and conversions in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Orange County, Manhattan and Hawaii.
His clientele fits the profile of early and ripe adopters of bitcoin transactions.
The specific Bay Area real estate transaction to which Habibi referred involved a $13M single family home. The buyer paid $8M with Bitcoin and $5M with cash.
Habibi believes that real estate professionals who adopt bitcoin and other crypto-currencies into their practices will have an edge in terms of deal efficacy, speed, broadening their client base and professional acumen. “We’re at the very beginning stages of crypto-transactions in real estate here in the US. Europe and Asia are much farther along. Develop expertise in crvpto-transactions and you’ll access an international client base. Start learning now and have a 2-5 year window in which to truly understand its usages and functionalities in all transactions, not only real estate.”
The benefits of Bitcoin transactions are many…speed (it essentially eliminates time warps and restrictions), security (it’s hack-less), anonymity… if the traders/investors/clients can tolerate inherent volatility and rapid value fluctuations.
Financial experts say that only .9% of the US population even has the term “bitcoin” in their vocabulary. But, as change moves at a faster and faster pace every day, it’s likely that bitcoin will become part of real estate’s lexicon sooner rather than later for all real estate professionals, not just real estate superstars like Roh Habibi.
