Realtor Shares Advice About Real Estate Domain Names

Bill Hauck
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Publisher’s note: Bill Hauck shared an insightful comment earlier this week about real estate domain names, and I asked him if he would be willing to expound on it in a blog post. Bill was kind enough to write the article below sharing some of his advice.

I’ve been a residential real estate agent for nearly 20 years and a domain name investor/enthusiast for at least the last ten years, maybe longer. During that time, I’ve purchased a number of real estate-related domain names to use for my real estate business, and others for the sole purpose of licensing or reselling. If you’re considering purchasing real estate-related domain names with the goal of licensing or reselling them to an end-user, my thought process as both Realtor and as a domainer may be of some help to you.

As a Realtor, I wanted to acquire geo-specific, real estate-related domains for lead generation. I was able to acquire several on Namejet and purchased (or negotiated trades for) other domains directly from the owners. Here is a list of domains I was willing to purchase over the years, albeit not at very high prices; SiouxFallsLots.com, SiouxFallsLand.com, SiouxFallsListings.com, SiouxFallsTeam.com, SiouxFallsCondos.com, SiouxFallsCondominiums.com, SiouxFallsBuilders.com, SiouxFallsBuilder.com, SiouxFallsSDRealEstate.com, SiouxFallsProperties.com and SiouxFallsHome.com. While I still own most of the above domains, the most desirable domains a Realtor can own, and more importantly may be willing to pay thousands of dollars for, are “City”Homes.com or “City”RealEstate.com. I was fortunate to acquire SiouxFallsHomes.com after many years of staying in touch with the owner and making generous offers for the domain.

In my opinion, “City”Homes.com is a bit shorter and slightly more brandable. However, I like the keywords in “City”RealEstate.com better and the domain can also be used for residential and commercial property. While there may be some money to be made in other real estate-related domain names, my personal preference when investing in geo real estate domains is to focus on “City”Homes.com and “City”RealEstate.com.

Once you have a quality real estate domain (RED) that you want to license or sell is to find an end-user. Years ago, I used to make lists of individual real estate agents and their e-mail addresses. While I had some early success that led to licensing three real estate domains (REDs), the returns weren’t high enough to justify all of the work. More recently, I’ve found that it’s become difficult to find e-mails addresses of individual agents, although I suspect there are services available for such purposes.

Here are some bullet points from my personal experience

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Bounced Emails Can Yield Hidden Info

Elliot Silver
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With most domain name privacy services, an email that is directed to the anonymized email address will automatically be forwarded to the domain owner’s email address. The sender won’t know the email address until the owner responds.

Yesterday, I was sending out some domain name offers and inquiries, and one of the emails bounced as undeliverable. This email happened to be a privacy service email, and I found a bit of a surprise when I opened it. The bounced email report showed the email address of the domain owner, and that gave me two important pieces of information that may prove to be helpful.

First and foremost, the email address will

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Domain Theft: The New Internet Scourge

Stevan Lieberman
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Having your domain name stolen is like getting punched in the gut. You try to log on to do some work on your site, or update some product information, but nothing works. You can’t get in, and you can’t switch things back. Or you check your email to find a notice that your domain name has been successfully switched to the new registrar, but you didn’t initiate any switch. You might feel lost, confused, miserable, and just plain angry.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to get your domain name back. First, change all your passwords. While changing passwords may seem a lot like closing the barn door after the horse already got out, you don’t want whoever hacked into your account and transferred your domain away to have any more access to anything belonging to you.

It won’t fix your problem, but it can help keep the hacker from getting to anything else in your email account, or transferring any more domains (if you have others) away from you.

Next, contact your registrar. You want to make sure they know about the problem as soon as possible. They may have a policy for those kinds of problems, or a procedure you can start on that will allow you to move toward getting your domain name back. They may also be less than helpful.

Either way, it’s important to make the effort to let them know what’s going on, as proof that you acted quickly and attempted to resolve the problem. Some registrars will be willing to file a complaint against the registrar to which the stolen domain was transferred, but that’s not the case with all of them.

If you don’t get a quick resolution from working with your registrar, there are more significant steps you can take. Although the UDRP process is not normally considered one of the steps you can take, recently an UDRP was filed and achieved the return of the domain name.

The case CIN –

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Follow Up With a Best Offer

Elliot Silver
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I make quite a few private acquisition offers via email on a daily basis. I am in constant contact with people who own domain names, and the vast (maybe 99.9%) majority of these domain names are owned people who bought the domain name with a plan to use it.

When making an offer, I try to be as reasonable as possible. I know that a low offer on a good domain name won’t elicit a response, and a high offer will hurt the chances of making a solid return on my investment. Making a reasonable offer takes some finesse, but it is an important aspect of the acquisition process for me.

More often than not, a response I receive is “the domain name is not for sale.” I have found that this sometimes really means

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3 Domain Name Thoughts for Startup Founders

Elliot Silver
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It’s partly frustrating and partly amusing to see criticism of domain investors and domain speculators from startup founders who are irritated that they can’t get their desired domain name at a bargain price. Some seem to feel like they are more deserving of specific domain names.

I want to share three thoughts about this, and I welcome your thoughts as well – even if we disagree. I am sure this isn’t the first time these things have been said, but they are worthy of consideration:

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Keep Some Funds in Escrow

Elliot Silver
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On Friday afternoon, I agreed to buy a domain name for what I think is a good price. It was getting late in the day, and there wasn’t much of a chance of getting the deal done that day, unless the money was already in escrow. For a situation like this, it might be good to have funds in your escrow account.

It doesn’t happen regularly, but I have had buyers and sellers back out of deals on me. They take a bit more time to think about the deal, and they decide they don’t want to close the deal. It sucks, but it happens. I have found this to be the case more regularly on deals that are agreed to prior to a weekend and are expected to close the following week. People either get cold feet about spending money on the domain name or they have second thoughts about selling a domain name for the agreed upon price.

When you keep funds in an escrow account, you can

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