The domain realsestate.com is at auction at Godaddy and with over 1 day to go, it’s already at over $3K.
Godaddy.com estimates traffic, at a pretty minimal, 191 visitors a month.
Why would someone spend thousands of dollars to buy a typo with minimal traffic?
Thoughts
That sounds like a huge waste of money.
Sounds like high traffic to me, surely the visitors aren’t that worthless?
I guess it’s the closest people can get to owning realestate.com, although I honestly don’t think it’s worth half it’s current bid price.
No clue to be honest. I don’t see a whole lot of value in this traffic, seeing as it’s pretty untargeted. A typo with 191 visitors to a CityRealEstate.com — maybe, at least one could more than make the money back with a single sale that way but I just don’t see that happening with this one.
Might as well one registers another typo like “raelestate.com” at $9.90!
I certainly wouldnt waste my money on a typo like this when I can buy a domain in snapnames or sedo etc that is a keyword or generic for the same money and actually build a business around it.
Seems crazy to me!
Regards,
Robbie
May be guy who owns the type right version
You need to flip just one small house to get it back
DUH!
I’d say it is currently worth about $350 in relation to parking revenues.
However, in the next couple of years or so it could be that typos won’t be allowed in parking, so unless he or she is going to set it up to capture leads or augment an existing business I don’t see the point of owning it……other than short-term parking income until the “typo nixing day” comes from G and Y.
For $350 though I’d still rather own a nice generic.
I just wanted to add that I have seen a flurry of these domains being sold at silly prices.
Irip.com went for about $8K yesterday on TDNAM with less than 100 uniques a month, if I remember correctly. There are a bunch of similar domains selling for prices like these. It’s really strange.
In Irip.com’s case it was a domain that was regged in early 96′ ……that is the only real reason I can see why the price went so high, but for me that reg date means nothing really.
Owen
I can see if the owner realestate.com wants the domain, but who is bidding against him?
~ Reals.com claims to be the #1 Real Estate Directory.. maybe they want it.
~ Fake bidders is always a chance.
~ Uneducated buyers
Those are a couple of my guesses.
While it’s certainly true that you only need to close on 1 or 2 houses to recoup that sort of investment, I still don’t think it makes sense to dish out $3k. It’s not a lot of traffic, though it may be enough… but it’s truly untargeted. As already stated if it had Boston, Chicago or other major geo in front of it, then it makes sense, but other wise that domain at anything more than $1k or so is a big fail in my book.
maybe the bidders name is Joe Real and …
he owns an Estate
Morgan
His name would have to be Joe Reals
The traffic is valuable for any developed realestate or lead gen site. On ppc alone the site will make about 1-2 dollars a day.
Aligned
At $1 a day you need almost 10 years to get your money back.
The same guy owns homesbuilders.com
We should see this one in a couple weeks for another 3k.
MHB,
Yes and i have seen generic typos go for alot more than 10x yearly revenue. Plus when the housing market turns around, that number could go up. Of course in that time typos might get devalued by google or yahoo.
“The traffic is valuable for any developed realestate or lead gen site. On ppc alone the site will make about 1-2 dollars a day.”
Mis-Aligned
Aligned
This isn’t a generic domain, its a typo.
I’m not sure that buyer will ever recoup his investment.
a few years back the typo laon.com sold for nearly 500k and is currently parked…if I bought this I would set up an affiliate site to realty trac, you can earn a decent amount of money with them, and I think it is actually a good time to get back into the realestate market with low rates and the gov rebates, everyone starts their search online.. but it would also depend on the traffic, it is a short term play, today most domainers i assume are buying to develop or sell to an end user…just my observations…
Yes its a typo. A generic typo, ala laon.com, forclosures.com. Pure type-in Targeted traffic.
Now is it worth over 3k, all depends on what your comfortable with as far as roi. Resale value is limited but is possible. The bidders have an idea of what the traffic is worth either for lead gen, ppc, or just driving traffic to their site. You own several such sites yourself so could value them based on ppc and what you are comfortable with as far as roi. ie amatuervideo.com. ( im sure you have more but first one i found)
“As already stated if it had Boston, Chicago or other major geo in front of it”
Wouldn’t the parking page geo target anyway? Is a visit to bostonrealestate.com really any more valuable than a visit to realestate.com?
$3k+ is a good price for the seller. There’s no room for easy resale later. Probably a buyer who knows how to convert such traffic into nice money. I have a similar typo (reale?state.com), does get clicks through parking. Maybe it’s worth listing at TDNAM.
“Wouldn’t the parking page geo target anyway? Is a visit to bostonrealestate.com really any more valuable than a visit to realestate.com?”
Any good parking page would geo target the ads, of course… I just meant that if an end user was buying it and of course lived in Boston for example, then it makes sense for them to buy such a name.
Otherwise throw up an ugly park page and hope to get enough clicks on that small amount of traffic. It can certainly pay off on PPC, but I’d feel better being a broker that just needed to convert a few sales. But it’s not my money, I’ll trust the buyer knows what they are doing. : )
$3k doesn’t sound too crazy to me, although its not really something I’d buy. It’s generic and targetted (well sorta targetted), and for a high ticket item such as real estate. I’d probably park it first to try to figure out what the visitors are actually looking for (more specifically), but there’s the gamble. What if what they are looking for is not that best case of the high ticket item. We’ll find out soon enough who buys it, who knows maybe it will even make sense when we see. I don’t think that someone like Re-Max would really have too many second thoughts on spending $3k on something like this either.
I am with own on this one. It is probably the owner of realestate.com and 3k does sound crazy in this market.
PeopleSearches.com
Aligned
Sure we own typo’s like as you point out amatuervideo.com, nothing wrong with it, but we paid a $10 registration fee for it, not $3k+
“but we paid a $10 registration fee for it, not $3k+”
Every domain someone paid just reg. fee at the start – including porn.com
D
Sure but what does that have to do with anything.
The issue is how much is a typo with 191 monthly visitors worth?
I say it isn’t worth $3K, but such domains are worth registering
D
Not every domain was paid for at the start. They used to be free before the mid-90s.
Mike,
The mother of all ironies is that this domain will likely sell for higher than it would’ve from all the extra attention it has gotten from your blog post.
Tony
We’ll see.
So far with just an hour to go it still is at the same price it was before I wrote the post
MHB- good point. I didn’t think of that.
I am fairly new to the ‘domain’ world. As I plan for my final retirement in the next few years, I moved a few dollars to domaining as an investment. When I see things like a typo adding up to MUCH more than a reasonable return, alarms go off.
Over the past year, I have acquired about 25 names. Some I use for business but the rest are speculative. Some are 5 to 7 characters in length. All could be developed. Despite the care I use in selection (# of letters, audience, current visitors, diversity and potential visitors, etc), when I ask for a simple “what do you think I could get at auction”, the answer always seems to be I would be “lucky to get between $50 and $150 dollars”.
This leads me to believe that many who participate in this business consciously try to fleece a newer(a newer player who might have all of his sophistication and skills fully developed) OR, many of you are starting to believe your own hype. Both are bad for the industry and for business.
Or, perhaps, is there something I do not understand?
Frankie
The term for a “newer Player” is a “newbie”, not a “newer”.
Fleece is also an interesting word.
When you get involved in any investment and certain a new business there are smart investments and poor investments.
There are some who feel this is a great buy at $3K.
http://blog.namewise.com/2009/05/28/what-is-the-value-of-realsestatecom/
Opinion vary.
Educate yourself.
No one is spending their day trying to figure out how to fleece the “newer”.
Can’t be horrible for the owner of bling.com either
MHB,
I understand that. I agree there is nothing wrong with it. You have a great portfolio of domains. Yet you have these domains listed on your site forsale and correct me if Im wrong but dont all offers have to be above 2000 or 2500.(I havent bought from you in awhile) So you do value these types of names that high. I understand you dont want to deal with lowball offers, so may just have that on your site. But I dont think thats the case. You would not sell a typo like amatuervideo.com (probably comparable traffic) or other such typos for under 2500. Nothing wrong with that as you had the forsight to get those domains, but indirectly you are placing similar values to such domains.
Good points you made to Frankie. You really need to educate yourself on domains and only invest what you are comfortable with. To some 10 year roi on ppc is worth it others dont want that risk. If you dont have any knowledge of what the worth might be for resell or yearly revenue, then look for a different domain. You will pick some winners and losers, just hopefully more winners.
I think “Aligned” brings up a good point in his post to MHB.
If you own typos and ask a minimum of $2500 for them, how can you ‘diss’ RealsEstate.com for 3k?
Tony
I write this blog for domainer to not only give them news and info on what is going on the world around them, but to give them some tips and the benefit of being in this business, since before it was a business.
My advice to you guys is that paying $3k+ for this type of domain is a bad investment.
Take the domain Aligned pointed out, amatuervideo.com.
That domain is making, i just checked, just over $100 a year in PPC.
So if you Hand Reg it or even back order it and wind up paying a few hundreds for its, its a good investment. But at $3K+ your looking at a 25 year payback.
If anyone wants to buy domains for 25X write to me first.
Also keep in mind that all typo’s are not the same.
amatuer is a very common mispell for amateur, like voyuer is a common misspell for voyeur. Those are different kinds of typo’s then a domain based on someone hitting the “h” instead of the “g” because one is next to the other and its also different than adding additional letters to something that is unnatural in language or patterns of language like “reals estate”
So what was the end price for the domain?
MHB,
Very valid point, all typos are not created equal. And as you said a common miss spelling like amatuer or amature definately has a stronger weight than a keyboard miss stroke. Im not advocating buying this domain or not. From a ppc standpoint I would not want it as i think you are looking at 10 to 15 years roi on it, and no resale value. Now if i had a lead gen site up and knew what similar traffic was worth it may well be worth it to me. Same thing if i had a developed site and knew the cost associated with gaining similar traffic to my site. Like all buys there are many factors to consider.
UPDATE
I’m told by My Godaddy rep, that this domain was redeemed by the owner prior to the conclusion of the expired domain auction.
lets see everyone here is talking about ppc. lets look at mortage.com that was sold for 250k i think thats how it was mispelled.and what did
costello brothers state? jupiterislandrealestate.com 4 words with less than 5 clicks a month sold for 18K.
so what this tells us is that the masses cannot spell just like rick schwartz has stated for 8 yrs.and any major real estate firm ie century 21, remax, gmac etc would love to get incoming clicks for 3k this is cheap and the math would be 175k avg house price at 5% commisioon would be 8750.and you look at all the realtors and companies paying 3 dollars or more per click…this is why domainers are asleep at the wheel.
no explaniation is need to the owner of this domain only the on lookers
from the bleachers…