The National Association of Realtors announced today that it will finally launch “.realestate,” a new top-level domain that will be available to its members and the members of the Canadian Real Estate Association in September. The domain will expand to the general public in late November.
This will allow people to set up websites that end in “.realestate” instead of “.com,” “.net” or any of the other many generic top-level domains that are seen around the web. The news of the launch comes four years after NAR beat out New North LLC, Uniregistry Corp., and Top Level Domain Holdings Limited in a bid to own the name, and joins .realtor, which NAR already owns.
“NAR is thrilled to launch our second top-level domain, ‘.realestate,’ to help real estate professionals and businesses better connect with homebuyers, sellers, investors and owners and remain essential to every real estate transaction,” said NAR President Elizabeth Mendenhall in a press release.
“Making use of this pioneering technology will help them to market themselves and their listings, services or resources in new and creative ways.”
NAR and CREA members who already have an active .realtor domain are eligible to buy their “.realestate” domain name on Sept. 18 — a little more than three months before it’s available to the public on Nov. 27. To participate, members must visit www.get.realtor, confirm their email address, have the username and password of their .realtor account, and have an active domain and a credit card on file that expires after Sept. 18, 2018.
On that date, members will be able to create their name, which can relate to a specific geographical area (newyork.realestate) a neighborhood (southbeach.realestate) or a specific company/brand name (BritneySpears.realestate).
Furthermore, “the .realestate will not have the naming, usage and eligibility restrictions .realtor has, where the domain name must follow the Realtor trademark standards and you must be an active Realtor, an NAR international Realtor member (IRM), the office designee for a Realtor office or the Association Executive of a board to claim and use,” explained NAR on the get.realtor homepage.
This makes the “.realestate” name potentially more inclusive, but also removes some of the professional gatekeeping that NAR has with realtor.com.
The pricing details are currently unavailable, and NAR will email them to members as the launch date draws closer.
“As CEO of NAR, one of my top initiatives is to leverage new technologies to help our members, their businesses, the profession and the industry grow,” said NAR CEO Bob Goldberg in a statement. “The launch of the .realestate domain with top-level domain industry leader Second Generation will bring great benefit from day one.”
Inman reached out to NAR with additional questions on the rollout and will update when we hear back.
