In mid-2013, Prudential real estate brokerages rebranded as Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. The brand name was a bit of a mouthful, and I thought it would be smart for the company to purchase the BHHS.com domain name since it was using the abbreviated BHHS in its logo. This would be good for marketing and make it easier for agents to communicate with clients using easier to remember @bhhs.com email addresses.
In January of 2014, I made the following suggestion in a blog post:
“From my perspective, Berkshire Hathaway needs to purchase the BHHS.com domain name. A shorter domain name like BHHS.com is easier to remember and would look much better on “for sale” signs and other collateral.”
This morning, I noticed that BHHS.com redirects to BerkshireHathawayHS.com, the website of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. A Whois search appears to confirm that the company acquired the BHHS.com domain name. There is no record of a sale on NameBio, so this would appear to be a private sale and the price will most likely not be publicly revealed. I do not see any emails from domain brokers trying to sell the domain name.
I tried to see when the domain name was acquired, but because of Whois privacy, the acquisition date is unknown. In addition, there are no website records archived on Archive.org. There is one screenshot of the current website on Screenshots.com from earlier this year. I sent an email in January to an acquaintance who is associated with the company mentioning my suggestion about buying BHHS.com, so it would appear that the domain name was acquired some time between January and May.
My guess is that this was a 5 figure deal, but we probably won’t find out for certain. Whatever the price was, I think it was a smart domain acquisition.
Good move on the part of Berkshire Hathaway. Real Estate companies and the industry as a whole have been inept and slow to adapt to technology. One of the premiere case studies in how to bungle your intellectual property with the outright sale of your domain is the Realtor.com fiasco in which it ends up in private hands and not with the organization that owns the trademark for Realtor – the National Association of Realtors. As a result, Realtors around the country and and around the globe do not have an owned portal option to compete with the other portals in the world. Rather, Realtor.com today is owned by News Corp. and is the equivalent of rented land–no different that Facebook, Zillow, Trulia, etc. Translation=pay to play. Every new portal endeavor by NAR is always some partnership in which the domain name is owned by someone else. It’s an ongoing absolute cluster.
https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-56873007.html
They rather want to used a name/acronyms letters for free; because they know it is too expensive to buy! No doubt!