$500,000 to acquire Home.loans domain name — Entrepreneur pays

Home.loans buyer has had success with websites built on fresh top level domain names.

Fresh top level domain name firm Donuts disclosed today that it has sold the domain name home.loans for $500,000. This is the highest publicly noted sale of a domain name under a fresh top level domain name to date.

Entrepreneur Blake Janover bought the domain name and is launching a site covering residential home loans. Janover has a fascinating story that he relayed to Reglike for a podcast that will be published on Monday.

Janover built a successful commercial lending business last decade only to see it evaporate as the world’s economy cratered in the Great Recession. He lost his fortune.

The fallout landed him on a beach in a fishing village in the Dominican Republic. While decompressing on the beach one day, a friend called him up and urged him to get back into multifamily residential financing.

So as Janover relaxed in a hammock, he went to GoDaddy and registered MultiFamily.Loans. He set up a site on Squarespace, added good content and got it crawled by Google. Amazingly, the site instantly ranked high on Google for “Multifamily Loans” despite lacking history or backlinks.

He went on to register other .loans domains such as HUD.Loans and CommercialRealEstate.Loans, created websites for them, and saw them rank high for the terms in the domains as well as other keywords. He was on to something.

Now he’s upping the ante with home.loans.

Buying any domain name for $500,000 for a fresh business is a risk, and many people will look at Janover’s choice of a fresh top level domain name instead of .com as an even bigger risk. But Janover looks at it differently. He told Reglike:

I’m a real estate guy and look at it from a real estate perspective. .Com, .net, doesn’t feel like an effective use of this digital real estate that I’m buying. I’m buying the top of your screen. I mean, what does .com really mean anymore anyway, what is its utility? And I’m not talking bad regarding it. I’m just saying that for everybody that wanted to buy two-word domains, you had to have two words plus like some little thing at the end of it.

For Janover, every time he tells someone the domain name, he’s able to start an interesting conversation.

He also owns .loan domain names but thinks that home.loans is better for his purpose than home.loan.

For more on the purchase and why Janover thinks the domain is worth the price, check in to Reglike Monday morning to listen to the full podcast.