A real estate website operating on an exact match .com domain name has been acquired for a considerable sum of money. Owners.com, “one of the largest marketplaces of self-directed home buyers and sellers,” was acquired by a company called Altisource Portfolio Solutions S.A. Altisource already operates a real estate auction marketplace called Hubzu.com.
According to this November 24th press release I read this morning, “Altisource purchased the company for $20 million at closing and up to an additional $7 million in potential consideration based on revenue earned in the two consecutive 12-month periods following closing.” Obviously this is not a simple domain name sale, but it marks the sale of another business using a keyword .com domain name as a brand.
There have been several large sales and deals involving real keyword domain names and businesses that use keyword domain names as brands in the real estate s[ace. Some of these sales and deals include the following domain names and businesses:
- RealEstate.com (sold for a reported $8.25 million)
- House.com (sold in private)
- Property.com (sold in private)
- Apartments.com (sold for a reported $585 million)
- Auction.com (a reported $50 million investment)
- Houses.com (a reported joint venture deal)
As the real estate market has rebounded, it seems that more capital is flowing into the space. There are several large publicly traded Internet-based real estate companies, and there are many privately held brands operating with a national presence as well as those that focus on local markets.
Prior to reading this press release, I don’t recall ever hearing of Owners.com, but it looks like the company has done well to grow this business.
Thank you to Peter Niederman of Kentwood Real Estate for sharing this news with me.
Obviously great branding potential for the domain name, but I certainly get the feeling that the existing website was already making nice profits. So as you said this is more of a purchase of an entire business, not just a domain name. Real estate is one of those very competitive industries with many different active players that would tend to push up the value of branding domain names in my opinion. Thanks for your article and list of other big real estate website/domain/business purchases.
In November 2014, News Corp. just acquired Move, Inc. operator of Realtor.com for $950M.