Property.com/Properties.com vs Buying a New TLD

Breaking News: Rick Schwartz sells Property.com & Properties.com for $4 million plus stock. Of course, congrats to Rick on his latest amazing domain sales.

That great domain name sale got me seriously thinking about something I have been dwelling on for a long time, which is the potential impact of the new gtlds, which will be coming online as soon as 2012.

What I mean by that is that since the .property and .properties tld extensions can be purchased for $185,000 each (plus other fees and expenses) it makes the 185k cost look like a great bargain (at least to me), compared to spending millions on the dot-com domains.

Think about this for a minute, would you prefer to own property.com at a cost of a few million dollars, or buy your very own ‘property’ extension for less than 10% of the dot-com price? At this time, some of you may say property.com is best but I feel that view is mostly because so few realize the great impact the new extensions will have in the future. In fact, I predict they will eventually dominate over other tld extensions.

A reason I say that is I am sure most all large and possibly mid-size corporations (maybe even some wealthy individuals) will buy their own extension. After a while I feel it is likely they will decide to brand under their own extension instead of the dot-com.

For example, assuming Ford buys .ford and also owns ford.com, don’t you believe one day they will switch their online brand to .ford and simply redirect ford.com to .ford? Keep in mind, dot-ford should be able to resolve stand-alone, depending on the server dns setup, so you can just typein “ford” to your browser and it will resolve. Same is true for “property” and “properties.”

So again, why spend millions buying the dot-com when you can buy the word without the .com to the right of the dot for 185k? Also, keep in mind, that cost is expected to drop sharply in a few years, well below 185k.

An excellent example of the benefit of going right-of-the-dot vs left-of-the-dot is the acronym domain-name “POS.COM” (a somewhat obscure acronym intended to mean “Point Of Sale”) which has me wondering why anyone today would offer almost a million dollars for pos.com when for “only” 185k they can as an alternative possibly purchase the .POS extension.

Another example is cars.net which sold for a staggering $170,000 last month according to dnjournal.com. The reason I say ‘staggering’ is since it’s a .net extension it will lose a good share of its traffic to .com from typeins. That’s a big reason dot-net is considered to be such a poor choice for a business and branding is difficult.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense for the buyer of cars.net to spend just 10% more and apply for the ‘cars’ tld? Can you imagine the powerful value of owning .cars tld vs cars.net! There really is no comparison when you consider how a business could easily brand themselves as ‘cars’ and tell everyone just typein the word ‘cars’ (and forget about adding .com or .net).

One more example is “StockBrokers.com” that recently sold for $185,000, which by coincidence is the exact same price as buying .stockbrokers extension.

Think seriously about this, wouldn’t you really prefer to tell websurfers to just typein “stockbrokers” to reach your website vs the longer “stockbrokers.com” There are many other examples where the cost of buying their own tld extension would have a lower cost vs buying the high-priced dot-com domain, and also make more sense for overall branding purposes.

As a cool monetary benefit, and option, you will also be able to sell to the left-of-the-dot names for extra income to enable other brokers to buy a domain such as TopBroker.StockBrokers.com, for example, plus you can sell unlimited numbers of other domains to the left-of-the-dot since you own the right-of-the-dot. Isn’t that interesting!

RunningShoes.com: from $150 to 700k in 5 yrs

DNjournal.com reports that RunningShoes.com sold for $700,000 making it the year’s biggest sale.

To add to the news reported by Ron Jackson, this blog can report the domain name sold for a measly $150 in 2005. Isn’t that amazing!

From low 3 figures to high 6 figures!

Jets.com was a great bargain at only $375,000

To someone who may not be experienced with domain name values the internet domain name Jets.com recently selling for 375k must seem like a ton of money. If it was purchased to try and take advantage of the New York Jets football team as was once commonly believed (until the actual buyer became known) and maybe to run some sports advertising on it and make a few bucks from running PPC ads (and taking a chance on a big trademark lawsuit or WIPO case), then I agree that 375k is a lot to pay.

However, the name was purchased by an end-user firm who rents jets and other airplanes according to what I see on the website today. Since jets both rent and sell for big and small fortunes the price was incredbly low. I believe just one sale or a few 25-hour rentals of a corporate jet would probably recover the domain purchase price in profit or commissions. After the first few transactions take place from the website traffic (and its typeins) it will be all gravy for a lifetime for the lucky owner and and 100% profit with every future airplane transaction. So the price was in actuality a tremendous bargain.

The new jets.com web site offers these prices: U.S. 2009 Pricing: 25 HOURS CARD MEMBERSHIP. Aircraft Price. Hawker 400 XP $114,500; Hawker 800 $125,000; Hawker 1000 $149,000; Gulfstream III $189,000; Citation X $189,000; Challenger 601/604 $199,000; Gulfstream IV $279,000.

This is what Yahoo! Answers says about the costs of jets: “Best Answer – Chosen by Voters: (buying and owning a jet) is very expensive considering all the FAA rules on rebuilding engines every so many hours whether they need it or not and a pilot is gonna cost you in excess of $100,000.00 per year and then you have the hangar charges which are like $3,000 a month, and then jet fuel which was $3.79 a gallon and then the insurance is expensive . There is an old saying at my rolls royce dealership – if you need to ask the price or the gas mileage you can’t afford it and I have found over the years how true !!!!! Byy the way cheap starter jets can be bought used for like $300,000.00 and up whereas the new ones like a 4 seater are probably going to run 1.5 million dollars or higher to start.”