Compass, a real estate brokerage firm, filed its S-1 Form with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Compass operates its business on the valuable, brand-match Compass.com domain name.

Compass, which runs an online marketplace for buying, selling, and renting real estate, files for S-1, reveals loss of $270M in 2020 on revenue of $3.7B (@mattpennyblake / HousingWire)https://t.co/vii3sb1BGqhttps://t.co/wDSTVrtgl2

— Techmeme (@Techmeme) March 2, 2021

There were a couple of domain name mentions within the S-1, which could possibly reveal the price the company paid to acquire its Compass.com domain name.

On page 126 under the Intellectual Property heading, the company wrote:

Two weeks ago, I reported that Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation acquired Fairway.com in a deal that was put together by Andrew Miller. The seller in that deal was NBCUniversal. The Fairway.com acquisition came shortly after Fairway acquired Home.com.

Yesterday morning, Jamie Zoch reported that NBCUniversal acquired the Betcast.com domain name to go along with its Betcast brand. Andrew Miller replied to the tweet to confirm the acquisition since he was involved in that deal as well. While these two domain name acquisitions are unrelated, it is because of Andrew Miller’s dealmaking that they both came together serendipitously.

I reached out to Andrew to see if he could share some background about these deals without sharing confidential details, and here’s what he shared with me:

This morning, I read a TechCrunch article about a company called Rows that was formerly known as dashdash, before a major rebrand. The article covered the company’s $16 million Series B round of funding, which followed its $8 million Series A round of funding in 2018. Smartly, the company acquired its matching Rows.com domain name in advance of the rebranding effort.

Historic Whois records at DomainTools show that Rows.com had previously been owned by Future Media Architects (FMA). FMA owns a large portfolio of exceptional domain names, and most of them are for sale. The company uses Saw.com to broker domain names on its behalf. From what I can tell, Rows.com was acquired by DashDash in late April or early May of 2020.

One must look no further than the company’s blog post about the Rows rebrand to learn how much the company paid to acquire the Rows.com domain name:

Last November, Jamie Zoch detected a change in the Whois record for the Wise.com domain name. Wise.com had been owned by Broadcom / Symantec, and the domain name transferred from CSC to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. In a tweet, Jamie predicted that an online money transfer service called TransferWise was going to be revealed as the buyer of the domain name:

It is likely that Broadcom/Symantec (they merged) sold Wise․com with the domain transferring to GoDaddy under privacy in June 2020. I will go on a limb and say Transferwise may be the buyer? They filed a “Wise” TM in April 2020 & both domains are using Cloudflare NS currently.

— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) November 18, 2020