Monday, January 6, 2020

UPDATED - Real Estate new gTLDs: 2019 in Review

One thing is for sure is that it takes time to adopt new gTLDs and the Real Estate industry clearly demonstrates that: the .CASA Top-Level Domain is a good example to look at (see below). As a reminder for a better understanding of these reports:
  • When no color from a month to the other = new gTLD registration volumes increase;
  • When in red, the volume of domain name registered decreased from the previous month;
  • When in blue, the increase in domain name registrations is noticeable from previous the month.
This is what I noticed in regard to 12 month of domain name registrations for extensions which string is a Real Estate keyword:
  • 32 extensions were selected for my report, one was withdrawn (.HOME), 6 are dotBrands (.BRANDs) Top-Level Domains for Trademarks, one exists in two versions, the singular and the plural one:
    • .PROPERTY
    • .PROPERTIES
  • No TLDs have more than 100,000 registrations but 9 had more than 10,000
  • One would expect all extensions to have more registrations in December than in January but it is not the case: on the 31 TLDs listed, it is the case for 14 of them so half of them (note that some extensions from this list stagnated during 12 months so "half of the list" is not entire true.
  • 7 extensions (.BRANDs mainly) had the exact same number of registrations in January and in December. Surprisingly, two are not Trademarks:
    • .MLS and
    • .LOFT 
  • 2 extensions, the .CASA and .HOMES Top-Level Domains - listed in blue - showed an interesting learning curve during the entire year. The first one tripled its registrations, the second multiplied them by 5.
  • The strange .CASA new gTLD figures:
    • In 2016: it ended the month of December 2016 with 18,077 domain name registrations
    • In 2017: 
      • it ended the month of January 2017 with 18,072 registrations,
      • and ended December 2017 with 6.262
    • In 2018:
      • it ended the month of January 2018 with 6,386 registrations,
      • and ended December 2018 with 5,682
    • In 2019:
      • it ended the month of January 2019 with 6,081 registrations,
    • and ended December 2019 with 19,602
  • The .REALTOR new gTLD, number one of this list, is for Realtors and lost nearly 7,000 registrations from January to December 2019.
  • The .REALESTATE - one of the most interesting Real Estate new gTLD to me - has almost the same umber of registrations in December (19,588) than what it had in January (19,547). Stagnation concerns other TLDs in  2019:
    • .HOUSE
    • .IMMO
    • .PROPERTIES
    • .RENTALS
    • .RENT
    • .APARTMENTS
    • .LEASE
    • .MAISON
UPDATE on .HOMES new gTLD

The Registry for .HOMES domain names was kind enough to answer our questions on the success of his extension and here is what he said:
"Until 14 Jan 2019, .Homes was a restricted TLD. On that date we removed all restrictions so that anyone could purchase .Homes domain names. As a result of that change, DUMs have increased from 800 at the end 2018 to 12,339 at the end of 2019; an increase of more than 15 times. A large percentage of registered names are geographic places - i.e., cities, towns, states, provinces, neighborhoods, and postal codes - as well as geo names with an additional key word (e.g. BuySeattle.Homes, MyDubai.Homes, The303.Homes). We are seeing agents buy their names and companies in the real estate industry purchasing company names - ranging from brokerages to home builders to mortgage providers to agent teams. For more background on name categories, see https://get.homes/domains/homes-domains-categorized/. Because the names are now open to everyone, we're seeing domain investors getting involved as well".
Thank you Jim ;-)

Read the full report here.

Coming: "Single vs Plural new gTLDs: 2019 in Review"

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !