The National Association of Realtors launched .Realtor about 3 weeks ago on October 23rd
To date there have been less than 85,000 .Realtor domain names registered.
The good news is that the extension has by far the lowest rate of parked domains with just over 1% of all .Realtor domain names being parked. According to ntldstats.com out of the 84,615 .Realtor domain names registered only 1,066 or 1.26% are “Parked”
Now here is the bad news for the gTLD’s.
According to the National Association of Realtors there are 1,063,950 Realtors in the United States as of June 2014.
To Register a .Realtor domain you have to be a member of the National Association of Realtors, not just be a real estate agent which according to the NAR is closer to 2 Million.
The National Association of Realtors is giving away a FREE .Realtor domain name to any Realtor who wants one, up to 500,000 domain names.
With over 1,050,000 Realtor’s eligible to register a free .Realtor domain name, less than 85K have.
That means less than 20% of the number of free domains has been registered.
When you are offering something for free, and less than 20% accepts the free offer I don’t think that is a great response, especially when there are more than two times the number of eligible people (realtors) than there are free domains available.
Only 8% of all eligible Realtors have accepted a free .Realtor domain name (assuming each registrant is a separate individual and no one has more than 1 .Realtor domain).
Now if we are talking about something that isn’t free but costs $20 or $50 or $100 a year or more, and ask what percentage of people in that business want a new gTLD that represents their business, occupation or profession you know that rate is going to be well below the 8% that took a free registration.
.Realtor has been out for less than a month and since its launch date, seems to be picking up some 200 free domain registrations a day.
No,
this is actually the FAST adoption rate.
What did you expect?
99.9% of the realtors that want a website already have a domain name.
And the ones that don’t want one will not get one now.
People and especially realtors don’t sleep and wake up thinking about domain names.
a hosting company OVH made 50,000 free domains available and they were gone on day 1
I’m sure none of them sleep and wake up thinking about domain names either.
Seriously? Do you compare .ovh and .realtor?
Who got these .ovh domains?
Spammers (cialiswholesaleonline177x26.ovh), people that wanted to experiment with domain names, children?, people from 3rd world countries etc.
There is no realtor that doesn’t have $10 to get a domain.
Most of these realtors didn’t get the domains because they were free.
And I am pretty sure that the free domains are less than a half of that 85,000.
As a REALTOR myself and someone who owns a ton of domains I do not even want my free one. Reason being is that, like with using the trademark term “REALTOR” with any other TLD, it is allowed only when used along with your personal name or business name. For instance, as a REALTOR I can use JoeBlowRealtor.com or ColoradoJoeBlowRealtor.com for my business but I cannot use just ColoradoRealtor.com or LakeHomeRealtor.com or any other generic terms or geo terms without also including my name. For that purpose it is a TLD that can only be used in a narrow scope for marketing your personal brand. I also don’t have a very common name so therefore am not worried about someone taking my personal .REALTOR name before I do..
Technical use terms here:
http://www.about.realtor/sites/default/files/dotREALTORBusinessRules%20100914Final.pdf
No one need $10 to get a. realtor domain they need $0 to get a domain
Free domains against free domains
If .OVH has 50K free domains available and they are all taken within the first days and .Realtor has 500K free domains and still has 80% available after 3 weeks, I think that says a lot
They don’t want a domain. They already have one or they don’t want one.
Why spend the time to get a free domain for one year if you are not going to use it????
Free domains that are available to all (spammers and scammers) against free but restricted domains for US and Canadian realtors only.
It says nothing. This is article makes no sense.
Have to agree with Konstantinos here. There are few outside of the domaining industry that sufficiently have their “finger on the pulse” on each extension as it is released in order to pass judgement in this regard, especially given lack of marketing to relevant target audiences. Too early to call any shots on an extension only a couple of weeks out of the gates, free of charge or otherwise.
Good article. Let’s not get distracted by the tangent taken in the comments. It’s true that .OVH and .REALTOR are quite different, but mainly .REALTOR seems to have a more sensible end use; and marketing to that constituency ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel, since they’re all members of one organization.
Even if .REALTOR is confining for realtors, it does confer some benefit (however small) and costs nothing more than a few minutes of thought. Or is there some other obstacle to .REALTOR registration for realtors that I’m unaware of?
What this article shows is that
(1) even the best-case marketing scenario (in which 100% of your target demographic is instantly reachable),
(2) even when the domain confers some positive benefit (even if it’s just risk mitigation and exclusivity),
(3) even when the domain is offered at ZERO COST,
where there is no perceived need to register a domain, people who already own websites will often not lift a finger. Spending 5 minutes to think about something new and go through the motions of getting a domain is too much. We’re busy. We’re fine. We don’t want to bother. We’ve already got what we need.
Many nTLDs domains will encounter more sluggish inertia than people might think. At least a dozen times, I’ve tried donating .COMs to companies or nonprofits only to have them forget to reply. Typically, people only lift a finger in life when there’s something they feel they want or something they’re made to fear.
.realtor is just the wrong string.
I was a realtor in my 20’s. I was loathe to use the term back then and I’d rather be caught dead than wrap myself in the flag of what is really a ‘brand’ owned by the NAR today. Who needs a micro-managing brand owner telling you how I “can” or “can’t” use a name to express yourself online. Namespaces need to be free and open to work and REALTOR will never be either.
.REALESTATE is a better string, but run by the NAR (who own REALTOR), it will likely come with the same baggage as their .REATOR extension, (unless their partner on the string can talk some sense into them).
That leaves .PROPERTY which will come out at $29.95 at Uniregistry on November 25th (10 days from now) PROPERTY will feature lots of registry premiums but we have left regional geo’s and everything else pretty much available.
The rest of the spectrum.. PROPERTIES, LAND, HOMES, REALTY is a bit like the land of broken toys, interesting to some folks, but not individually strong enough to create a center interesting to all in the space.
The name game is the same as it ever was. Good names trump the hoopties. The cream rises. But in this world it’s the name spaces with low prices and hands-off governance that rise up to the envy of others.
Self-promotion it may be; but I agree with you, Frank.
This is just a worthless diatribe.
What constitutes a “regional geo” that you will be making available?
I ask as about 90% of the top 200 cities in the US and the UK with .property, along with states/shires and countries, currently appear to be premium registry reservations.
Well Frank there are a lot of “wrong” new gTLD’s out there.
.Rest, .best, .army, .navy .airforce, I could go on but there are a bunch of football games starting in a few hours.
So one problem is there are too many extensions which is why i always though the number should be limited to something reasonable based on the 22 that came before it instead of expanding from 22 to 1,400 in a year.
The second issue is too many extension for many verticals.
Sure you have .realtor and .realestate and .property and .realty but you also have .land .condos and .house and.apartments.
Maybe your right that .realtor is the “wrong” extension, but there are over 1 million people that belong to that association and call themselves realtors and the fact that only 8% of them accepted something for free, which if nothing else acknowledge their membership into a group and profession they are a member of cannot be just dismissed with its the “wrong” extension
Think I left .MLS out too
“there are a bunch of football games starting in a few hours.”
Are you watching some football games? I noticed your setup at home, on one of your tweets. Check this out:
Sorry.
SkreensTV
I am stunned by all this.
gTLD’s finally have a bit of a success story and you guys pour water on it.
8% penetration in a matter of days is damn good!