Foreclosure.com Founder, President and CEO, Brad Geisen, announced today that he has reached an agreement with “Domain King” Rick Schwartz, to acquire the domain name “Property.com,” paving the way for his entry into a new market.
With Property.com Geisen intends to create a one-of-a-kind — and convenient — one-stop online real estate marketplace that is easy-to-use and navigate. The Web site will serve as an easy-accessible national real estate classified that is going to be free to all visitors, providing sellers, buyers and investors with a whole new concept of marketing and finding homes on the Web.
According to Geisen, the acquisition of Property.com will allow him to focus his efforts on a different and potentially much larger segment of the real estate market. In fact, in Geisen’s opinion, the niche foreclosure market, which is Foreclosure.com’s market, represents just 2 percent of all available real estate inventory.
“I’m going after the 98 percent of the real estate market outside of the foreclosure business.” said Geisen. “For the past several years, I’ve built and run one of, if not ‘the,’ most successful Internet foreclosure businesses, but the business was always exclusively distressed real estate. I’ve achieved in Foreclosure.com what I set out to accomplish and I am ready for a new challenge in a different market. I intend to shift my focus on developing my new ideas that will revolutionize how homes should be listed, viewed and purchased. I’ve developed the critical skills which I intend to apply to this new market,” said Geisen.
The price of the transaction was not disclosed but it is known that Rick invested $750K for property.com 5 years ago and everyone laughed at him. He has 5000 more equally as good.
The thing with the web is that a million dollar home in Boca is only $500K to someone from the UK- the web lets you expand this reach
Ironically it was in Rick's forum in 2005 when people laughed at me for suggesting there was a guy with an 18-character domain that was an associate of an agency I worked with. Even then it gets 5 million hits a month and had 750,000 unique home showings (that's the virtual equivalent of a broker taking qualified prospects around to 750,000 different homes). Yet this domain failed Great Domains "length of character" test and was appraised for something like $3500.
American Home Guide's family of Web sites, including www.americanhomeguides.com receives 8 million visitors per month and generates tens of thousands of home buyer leads for builders. American Home Guides' Founder, Owner and President, Barry Lynn, began the company in 1994 as a product of his South Florida advertising agency.
The company quickly grew into a regional and national Web marketing solution as builders found the Internet to be an effective vehicle to market their homes. Barry knew nothing about computers but started with the help of a geeky high school student in his bedroom.
In 2005, PrimeMedia’s Consumer Guides, the country's leading publisher and distributor of apartment, new home and auto guides, significantly expanded its new homes Internet presence with the acquisition of www.americanhomeguides.com, minting yet another dotCOM millionaire.
The secret was not type-in traffic but adding the matching URL to that free publication everyone takes while they are getting their Bentley's washed in Boca.
See they didn't want a bunch of traffic to get lost in their homepage. Instead they printed different price ranged homes and distributed in the appropriate neighborhood. That way they were pre-qualified to have means, and by flipping through the photos, they were predisposed to want to tour a specific property.
That means even if you don't have a category-killer traffic-rich domain like Property.com, with the right marketing, there is still opportunity for your name elsewhere online.
Gotta love the Internet.
Congratulations, Rick.
PS. If you want to know his secrets, just click on the Rick Schwartz tab below
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
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