Last night the highest priced paid for a new gTLD of the three that were at the ICANN last resort auction yesterday was .Realty at $5.6 million purchased by domain industry veteran Jay Westerdal’s company. (The exact price paid was $5,588,888)
.Realty joins .Realestate; .Realtor; .Property, .MLS, .Immo, (which is short for immobilier which means real estate and is used in France, Germany and Italy) and to a smaller extent .House, .Condos, .Rentals and .Apartments.
Its a pretty crowed vertical.
So the question is was that a good investment based on all the vertical competition?
Where do you rank the extension in relation to the others?
.Realtor and .Realestate are owned by a group associated with the National Association of Realtors.
.Realtor domains will be offered for free for the the year to the first 500,000 members of the organization who sign up for their company’s domain name or their personal domain name ie JohnSmith.realtor, but Geo’s and other premium domain names will not be available on that basis. So a realtor named John Cleveland would be able to get JohnCleveland.Realtor but not Cleveland.Realtor.
.Realestate will be somewhat registricted as well but premium domain names like NewYork.Realestate is a premium and be sold as such.
.Property will be unrestricted.
Back to .Realty, at $5,6 million acquisition cost if the wholesale price (the price the registry charges to the registrars) is say $50 with a $99 retail price, it would take well over 110,000 domain registrations just to begin to break even not including premiums.
Assuming a share qualified real estate agents get a free .realtor domain, we can assume others may register A .MLS domain a .RealEstate domain, a .Property or one of the others in the verticals.
Also remember that some of the largest cities in the world have their own new gTLD’s including Tokyo, New York London and Paris many of which work just fine for realestate ie brooklynrealestate.nyc or Flats.London
So at the end of the day how many new gTLD registrations will there be in the real estate vertical?
Enough to make .Realty a profitable investment a .reality?
