Sale of vacation.rentals eclipses home.loans sale.
A vacation rental company has paid $500,300 to acquire the domain name vacation.rentals from registry Donuts in an all-cash transaction. This is the highest publicly reported sale of a second level domain under a new top level domain name to date.
Vacarent, LLC is a vacation rental company that hopes to capitalize on growing frustrations with Airbnb and HomeAway. The company won’t charge commissions and instead will just charge annual subscription fees to homeowners. This was the model HomeAway followed for many years before switching to a transaction-based model.
HomeAway acquired the established business VacationRentals.com in 2007 for $35 million. The CEO of the company in 2007, Brian Sharples, indicated that it was mostly to keep it out of its competitor’s hands and a big part of that was the domain name.
Search for vacation rentals on Google today and VacationRentals.com comes up #1. But Vacarent says it hopes the vacation.rentals domain name will help it slowly chip away at the organic listings.
Creating a marketplace is difficult, so search engine rankings will need to be a key part of vacation.rental’s strategy to attract homeowners and renters.
The deal was brokered by Uniregistry broker Brooke Hernandez late last year.
You might notice that the sales price is $300 more than the record-setting sale of home.loans last year. That’s likely not a coincidence.
There are just over 12,000 .rentals domains active in zone files according to nTLDstats.
Thank you for publishing this Andrew.
You are correct, the extra 300 was not a coincidence. 😉
Have a great day, Mike Kugler
President/CEO
Vacarent, LLC
Congratulations, Michael. It’s a top notch internet address and instantly memorable.
They sold you smoke and mirrors. The same SEO benefits this domain may get, you can get from any other established extension (.Org, Net, Co, etc). What you won’t get here is anyone, ever typing in this domain. In addition, what would definitely happen is whoever come across this domain, a certain percentage of them will go to VacationRentals.com next time around. Your marketing dollars, evaporated.
Martin, you may be right. I will concede that we took a risk. But, it was absolutely a risk we were willing to take.
The ironic things about it though is that the search engines don’t seem to agree with you as we have been smashed for the past 2 months with inquiries from homeowners and travelers who “found” us searching on the internet.
So… there is that….
Besides – what is a .org or .co extension? We are declaring to the engines we are a rentals website and so far it appears to be working.
I do have a couple of questions here, what made it 500K and not a 300K or 50K deal? Did they come to you, or you went to them to buy the domain?
I have been chasing this domain since August 2015 when they started releasing the .rentals TLDs
Because I had never seen a “site” come up for it, I presumed someone was holding onto it so I signed up for a monitoring service to be notified if it ever did come available.
2 1/2 years later at 2:04 in the afternoon of November 16, 2017 – I got that e-mail.
I have worked in this industry a loooooonnnnnggggg time. We own a resort in Branson, MO. and know very well the intensity of the travelers and what they search by. To say I have been chasing this single URL to the point of being a stalker would be an understatement.
They actually asked for more than the 500K. The 500K was my counter cash offer and they accepted it.
No one can say definitively what the search engines will do, but I can say that the early results have been overwhelming (without any press release – we have been building the site now for the past 4 months on Laravel frameworks) Literally, every – single – day we receive inquiries either from homeowners or travelers. Once we get the inventory built up, I think it will be a beautiful site.
And – we will keep customer service at the forefront of everything.
Have a good one, Mike
Thank you for the answer, and wishing you the best!
The possibility of people going to vacationrentals.com is certainly there…
…but they may also go to vacation.rentals.com
However, it is also as likely they could go to…
Vacation.rentals…
…directly
…bookmark
…search engine
…or via link from an email sent out from vacation.rentals
How many .rentals are registered? What happens if/when the registry folds because of lack of registrations. Half a million in the garbage.
As the article states, there are 12k+ in the zone.
The domain is owned by Donuts, and I believe the company is highly profitable.
Now that new gTLD registry operators are so profitable, perhaps they’ll stop begging ICANN for millions of dollars of corporate welfare (rebates on their registry fees):
http://domainincite.com/21659-new-gtld-registries-want-a-17-million-icann-rebate
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/diaz-to-atallah-et-al-14mar17-en.pdf
Only the dumbest and the meanest would challenge the value of good names in new extensions.
Vacation.rentals is a fantastic name. I see gtlds in use all over DC. It’s great to see one of the better names being put to use.
@Michael: Even though I am not a big fan of new gTLDs, I must say Vacation.rentals is a fantastic name. Congratulations
Thank you very much. We hope to make it a great experience for homeowners and travelers.
God knows, it has been a wild ride so far.
Thank you again
Nearly any domain can win with enough money and consistent drilling of it into the public/consumer. In saying that this sell shows the lack of an available and good vacation (dot com) name put them into a $500k corner. Money well spent, well if the goal was to media blast the name and spend millions to do so, no, any name would have worked but then again it “looks” better and for that they paid $500k but that $500k in itself was a fancy sticker, the marketing needs to be strong now. Most spend big money on a good dot com to avoid having to spend as much, not the case with a gltd. Over all I am meh on this purchase, good bad, who knows but def. a huge leak will continue to the dot com’s.
These gtld purchases for large sums are not motivated for the same reason the dot com purchase is and for that defeats a vast majority of the purpose, maybe that is where I am going with the above.
There is no risk of the .rentals nGTLD being discontinued.
Here is what Paul Stahura has said:
“…Donuts is profitable. We think of all the TLDs as one big registry. Its profitable, so all our TLDs are profitable…”
TheDomains (“Donuts: We are not Going To Delete New gTLD Extensions”)
The base cost to a registry is only “a fixed fee of US$6,250 per calendar quarter” (ICANN website) so the cost of running a string is negligible.
No doubt each extension does not require a big independent team of technicians and servers, they can be combined. Hence large aggregating registries like Donuts and Radix should do well into the future, as awareness grows.
Donuts is a very clever company, and was recognized recently with an important award by Deloitte (2017 Technology Fast 500 winner). They would not want the reputation damage that cancelling a string would cause which would far surpass any “savings”.
In any case, with this record-breaking sale alone, not to mention any others, the .rentals extension is already massively profitable.
Congratulations to Vacarent and Donuts.
another registry sale. surprise, surprise…
Congrats to the Donuts team, really good news and hopefully we’ll see continued momentum on New TLD Premium Domain sales.
This is really interesting as the big spend in VR is polarizing between PPC and a leaning toward mainstream media this year. Getting traffic to a converting site and getting sufficient inventory to convert makes good sense.
Needs deep pockets and market drive of course, but if you look at what is happening slowly a) guests paying more on OTA’s as inventory owners raise prices to cover fees (and even Airbnb now trialing commission only and removing the service fee) b) Guests becoming aware of the service fees (reason for the Airbnb trial?) c) Individual owners, especially stateside were the friction and push backs continue unabated and d) voice and AI coming,
The extension game may become more specialized and only takes Google to decide this. Domain squatting is holding back many on .com so this seems an obvious route.
Villas.com went for $477,630 on 7/1/2008 to Priceline (they didn’t need it if course) so a market of serious interest with all the big rental businesses being sold. Luxuryretreats.com ($300m) and many more.
They overpaid for a domain hack by $500k IMO.
I paid less than $100 for a 2 letter new gTLD domain NS.domains. A domain extension also owned by Donuts.
Unfortunately, some parts of the world do not use the word vacation, most of Europe use the word holiday instead of vacation.
Vacation is more of a USA and Canadian word.
Sincere condolences to the buyer. I’m deeply sorry for your loss.
Great sale, great domain with a perfect left.right! Best of luck to the new owners and congrats to the seller. Sites like this put new G’s on the map. 🙂
I own VacationRentals.ca – best domain for Canada – it will easily rank not just tops for Canada for “Vacation Rentals” but also tops on google in all other country codes when those from abroad search for rentals in Canada which are massive all year round … we just sold a good one in ManhattanVacationRentals.com too to a realtor
We also have Vacation-Rentals.ca for insurance and VacationHomeRentals.ca
This will definitely help new buyer to compete with existing airbnb and homeaway properly. Vacation.rentals have capability to come 2nd or 3th for vacationrentals in some time as posts and content will increase.
Their purpose to get organic leads from internet will get fulfilled and in 1 year or 2 , you will get your investment back spent on this domain by the huge organic leads revenue.
good domain is half work done to get adjacent to vacationrentals.com
Congratulations to all of You – Donuts, The Buyer, The Broker, The new Gtld industry and the new gtld believers including me.
Do you guys know that Expedia LLC owns VacationRentals.com, VRBO.com, HomeAway.com and many other top notch names? They do not COMPETE they DOMINATE!
The “annual subscription fee” is a terrible business model that you can SCALE only to a certain point, then the big fish will eat you 🙂
I would have recommended doing a deal with Expedia trying to acquire or lease VacationRentals.com instead of flushing 500k on a gTLD.
This is a Donuts registry sale. I wonder what kind of “benefits” were negotiated for this transaction other then the 500k cash? 😉
You do realize I have clients lined up by the 100s who want to list on my website starting tomorrow don’t you? The dot-com will only be relevant if they have inventory. If the inventory switches over to us, guess who is not worried about the dot-coms?
100s….literally 100s – then 1,000s….
We are growing faster than we can handle. And yes, we are ranking massively on the search engines now – on a site that is not even launched and taking subscriptions.
As to what Donuts gave me in terms of “benefits” – short of professional decency, nothing more. They want to see https://vacation.rentals succeed as much as I do.
(And yes, I was fully aware of Expedia and their role in the aforementioned sites years ago – no worries here.)
Seen this come up when I read about the new record sale with Online.Casino
Man, time has really flown for https://www.vacation.rentals
We are now closing in on 1500 listings and “should” hit that mark sometime by the end of December if not sooner. And, we are now 8 months in a row on the first page of Google – complete with screencaptures and video proof.
Best – purchase – ever!
How does Vacation.rentals rank today?
Google: “3rd page result”
Bing: “2nd page”
Yahoo: “2nd page”
I get postion 12 organic on Google. Uk search.
The massive rise is Home2Go recently.
I have Hollywood.Rentals, anyone interested? 🙂
just asking
I have accommodation.rentals available for just $3500
getting on for 3 years after purchase, Vacation.rentals still does not rank highly on Google for “vacation rentals”. Not sure that plan paid off… would love to hear an update on the podcast though.