A little over a year ago, you couldn't talk about metaverse real estate without my seeming to appear out of nowhere to give a statement or share some updated research on the topic. It was a big part of my life, and I was keeping the records of its progress from concept to reality. Then the crypto winter hit, and prices for land in popular destinations like Decentraland (MANA 2.98%) and The Sandbox (SAND 4.79%) violently plummeted, as did sales activity.

There was very little to track in the world of virtual land, but I kept tracking it anyway. An emergent technology is always going to be a bumpy ride, isn't it? But after a while it got to feeling like less of a ride and more of a trend. And I almost gave up my cheery optimism on the future of the metaverse entirely.

I'm sure glad I didn't. I found a few bright points of light to keep me going, and they grew and grew, as it turns out.

Metaverse real estate is more than a flash in the pan

Despite the war in Ukraine, despite a global economic downturn, despite climate change and all kinds of other scary things happening on this planet, the metaverse has continued to persevere. 2022 was not a great year for it or its investors, but in a way, it got them thinking about more creative ways to do business there.

Tokens.com (SMUR.F 10.32%) spent 2022 providing not only leases on lands throughout metaverse platforms, but consulting services as well. According to recent filings, its $2.8 million worth of land holdings returned $23,000 in rents during Q4 2022, and its metaverse consulting, which includes things like helping a tenant design a virtual structure for rented virtual land, brought in $85,000. On an annualized basis, Q4 showed an approximately 15% gross return on that $2.8 million in lands, which is not shabby at all for something that barely existed a year prior.

Big names continue to elbow in for space at the table

With Metaverse Fashion Week just around the corner in late March, it's easy to talk about brands that want a piece of the metaverse. Although real-life fashion brands are still making money selling fashion NFTs for avatars, they're also using these opportunities to reach customers in real life, extending options from the metaverse to purchase the real thing in the real world.

But the metaverse is hardly ruled by the fashion-forward. Dow Jones itself has set up its own virtual HQ in Decentraland, as has KB Home, along with virtual tours of real-world homes that are currently for sale. Even banking giant HSBC has opened a virtual golf course at The Sandbox.

Assets are beginning to thaw

The crypto winter came so close on the heels of the moment the world was captivated by what the metaverse could be that it came close to freezing it to death. Assets like coins are still well below their highs, but something kind of miraculous happened in January.

Not only did the crypto Fear and Greed Index finally reach and (mostly) stay above "Fear," indicating that crypto enthusiasts and investors were back in the saddle, but this rising tide also helped create a sudden spike in metaverse coin values, like Mana, which rose from $0.44 per coin on Jan. 13 to $0.61 on Jan. 14, and has mostly stayed around or above that value since.

Various pricing metrics for metaverse real estate also saw a huge bump during that period. Decentraland's daily average floor price -- that is, the lowest average price a virtual property is listed for on any given day -- was $2,037.76 for January, up from December's $1,502.47. The Otherside, the metaverse platform in development by the Bored Ape Yacht Club (CRYPTO: BAYC) and that runs on ApeCoin (APE 2.81%), saw a similar bump in the average virtual land sales price from $2,645.46 for December to $4,198.23 in January.

So far, these are trends that are continuing to hold for these popular platforms. Even The Sandbox's average sales price jumped between December and January, from $1,193.30 to $1,483.98.

I still believe the metaverse has a future

The metaverse is something my own generation, Generation X, will never fully understand, even if we're trying to get a grip on how to use it to get more visibility for brands, or to even start companies in the metaverse. But we're not the target audience of this new type of online interaction. Generation Z is.

These people were born between 1997 and 2012, and they've spent their lives invested in centralized platforms that look and feel much like what the decentralized metaverse promises, including Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft. There are around 70 million of these people  in America today, with only a fraction of them currently old enough to hold a crypto wallet and therefore financially participate in the metaverse. The rest can only pop in on a visitor's pass, or by using someone else's account. 

The ranks of 18-and-over GenZers are growing every day, though. They're doing things in virtual worlds that we had never thought to do, and they're interacting with brands, getting to know about new products, and generally having a great time there.

What I really realized this winter was that Gen Z is the future of the metaverse, and it's coming whether we believe in it or not.