Agents are embracing unique domains for each high-end home they sell.
The current publication contains a total of 100 homes. Here’s a comparison of the types of domains used to promote homes this year compared to two years ago.
- 78% of the homes have their own domain in 2017, compared to 54% in 2015.
- Of the homes that have domains, 55% use addresses (such as 3602MurilloCircle.com) in 2017. 73% used this type of domain in 2015.
- Of the homes that have domains, 45% use descriptive domains (such as RivercrestWaterfront.com) in 2017, compared to 27% in 2015.
100% of the domain names are .com. It’s relatively easy to find an available .com for a home since they have unique street addresses. Real estate agents are more likely to pay $10 to get an available .com than more for addresses like .forsale.
I live in Southern California and I own all the cities with house and home domain names and dot com . Each house here starts at a 1/2 million selling price. The Agents here are totally oblivious to the dot com market and bought their own name to sell houses. Many are Spanish Realtors and there is no way I could ever say their name besides spell it. I got sick of trying to tell them about names, so I decided to put my clay Christmas Village houses for sale on the domains, until some big KING type of broker wakes up. I also have all the Commercial property names and they look at me like I am crazy.
I frequently use the example of SouthernCaliforniaRealEstate.com in pointing out how many long domains are worth a mint and far more valuable than many short .coms.
I completely agree, too many sheep in this industry sometimes
Interesting. Can you give some examples of some of the domains you own?
My wife and I were walking through the neighborhood last night and saw a ‘for sale’ sign with bhhsTXRealty.com as the domain name.
Believe it or not, that’s the domain for the local franchise of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices realty.
What a horrible domain.
Andrew, yea I actually came across them and their horrible domain while researching potential buyers of Texas.com (a domain I’m helping eNaming market and sell). Imagine them upgrading from bhhstxrealty.com to texas.com. Game changer right there. At the VERY least they should have been able to get something much better and cleaner than their current name.
I bought a few real estate names and I think the market has yet to reach it’s potential. Several large retail companies spent on TV ads, the one I am thinking of, which will remain nameless, has several million going every weekend. What they don’t get is that their site with national listing makes it harder to navigate. Rather than spend on all this air time, they should invest in city, region and classification style real estate domain names.
Here’s a few of what I have.
SouthernHomes.com
FloridaBeachHomes.com and FLBeachHomes.com (as a pair)
FortLee.net
BeachHomesAndRentals.com
“100% of the domain names are .com.”
THAT says it ALL.
All are end users.
Cost $10 and impresses the home owner. SMART!
And what about those .realtor domains ?
lol
A little different than the subject of your post, but I find most realtors don’t get the value of owning the cityhomes or cityrealestate or cityrealty .com (or in Canada .ca) domain of the city or area they work in. These types of domains look so good in ads and real estate magazines, compared to realtors using their own names for domains that you’ll never remember, or something like ‘live in so and so .com’ or ‘city homes by seller.com’. A few realtors do get it though, one recently said to me they wanted to buy the CityHomes.com of the city they work in, in case they wanted to sell their realty business in the future. That is a reason I had never thought of before, and good forward thinking, not to mention the increased prestige they’ll get in the meantime. Until then they had been using their own name as a domain.
Geo + homes are the best to own. Here in Utah, Caldwell banker owns Utahhomes.com.
The name UtahRealstate.com is own by the local MLS. Then you move into smaller populations like Park City. ParkCityRealestate.com which was sold at bargain at 60k.
Name like ParkCityHomes are worth 250-500k IMO. Deer Valley Homes go for 5 to 30 million. And Realestate agents balk at paying for a domain. LOL
Realestate agents lose money because they have horrible names.
I purchased the word home house homes houses for every city in the San Diego area and up the coast to San Francisco putting the word before and after the city and have never had an inquiry. My little Christmas Village houses will be so cute on the beach city websites! I decided I will take the $40 Village house sale and hopes to sell a 1000 houses next year! That would mean I would have to box and ship each house~ Crazy
I am with all of you 100%
I grew up in the Playa Vista area of West Los Angeles, and thought registering real estate, medical and attorney domain names would be an easy sell.
After sending tons of email directly to clients websites or whois contact email, not a single reply…I really don’t have time to call each office, any suggestions?
I can’t believe they would pass up names like: all dot com
Playa Vista Condo for Sale
Playa Vista House for Sale
Playa Vista Hot Property
Playa Vista Open House
Buy a House in California
Thanks.
John
most realtors date pre the internet and don’t get it so they buy leads from homes.com etc, they also let the realtor organization sell their listings to zillow etc and then pay them for leads, as forest gump said stupid is as stupid does,
Geo+Homes & Geo+RealEstate .coms are the top of the pile when it comes to Geo+Keyword real estate domains. We’ve sold some Geo+Realty coms as well but haven’t had much success with many of the other keywords.
Namebio compiled some data on this last year:
https://namebio.com/blog/top-100-keywords-geo-keyword-domains/
We currently own either the ‘City’RealEstate .com and/or the ‘City’Homes .com
for approximately 15% of all cities with 10,000+ population in the US. Mostly smaller cities in the 20-50k population range, maybe a dozen or so in the 100-250k range.
Many agents understand the value of a great domain but I’d guess that close to 0% like to be contacted out of the blue. Even when end user outreach is successful, it often results in lower level sales. For both those reasons, we stay away from it.
I made a four figure sale for a specific address to a high end home 5 years ago.I only purchased it because the home had a infamous owner.in it’s past.(mobster) The (smart) broker who purchased it was only interested in the number and first name of the street (34windward.com…for example) Had ZERO interest in whether it was street or avenue or whatever. There must be hundreds of 34 Windwards out there.But if you own it in .COM…yours is the only one that matters.
New agent getting ready to list my first home over 600k. I will definitely be our purchasing the address and the. Community name + homes if available.
The realtors are still clueless, Real Estate is probably one of the best uses for a domain name. No one has ever contacted me about CaliforniaCondos.com or TexasCondos.com, guess they don’t have condos in those States. Two people have contacted me about FloridaCondos.com, I live there so I know we have condos here.These are not even my best RE names but I am surprised that more people have not inquired about them. I remember when we had newspapers back in the old days and Real Estate company’s where one of the biggest advertisers. Having a domain name that can easily be remembered is essential for any Real Estate professional or office.
Honestly I would say state + condos may be a bit too broad. I would say city + condos is probably more desirable among most real estate companies.