Valuable mortgage domain name goes unused as interest rates drop below 5%.
With 30 year fixed mortgages going for 4.5% in the United States, mortgage refinancing activity has been brisk. But for most of this year a key generic refinancing domain name – refinance.com – has been dark thanks to woes at Homebridge Mortgage Bankers Corp.
Legendary domainer Garry Chernoff sold Refinance.com to Homebridge, which later did business as Refinance.com, back in 2005 for just over $700,000. Homebridge did a brisk mortgage business handling more than 7,500 applications in 2006. But the company sputtered from there. Mortgage Lender Implode-o-Meter writes that the company was embroiled in several lawsuits. The company had difficulty meeting payroll last December, and in January lost its New York State license.
Last year the ownership record for Refinance.com changed from the company’s CEO Nicholas Bratsafolis to a DNS admin, and the site no longer resolves. I couldn’t find any bankruptcy filings for the company in New York (where it’s incorporated), but presumably this asset won’t sit dormant forever.
The big question is, what would refinance.com sell for in today’s market?
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Its not for sale. Just spoke to them.
I tried calling them with no luck.
We own RefiSources.com. The next 2 to 4 years should be good for domainers with mortgage related names IMO.
The market for mortgage related names is very soft. The lending industry has changed a great deal over the past 24 months. Right now lenders have abundance of clients thanks to the low rates. and the number of mortgage brokers no longer in business do not work well for this theory…..just look at the millions lost by lendingtree late last year…this is a category killer domain name which would probably still pull in 1 million plus in the aftermarket…and I think the only market left is category killer names or top geo targeted mortgage names, the sub par names are to hard to develop to rank well and you can buy leads online for a fraction of their previous cost, its interesting that 2 of the top 3 names (homeloans.com) in the space dont resolve…in regards to selling the name, if they are forced into a bk scenario then they dont get to choose if this is an option, the courts will decide and this is probably their most valuable asset to liquidate..
Yea, it’s not for sale unfortunately 🙂
But good news — I got LowRefi com/net/org for anybody who is interested and I’ll sell for 10x less 😉
Hola! 😉
Banned from Google? Interesting.
Edit: No, not banned… just not used. Jeez, dare I say it… Not even parked.