A Place Called Hope: Internet Real Estate

By kenyanentrepreneur Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I know Kenyans are obsessed with their real estate, but there’s another form of real estate that’s making a lot of money and that doesn’t require a huge investment of cash– $7 dollars a year is all it takes to register a domain name these days. I was thinking about this post because I just finished reading a blog site that listed the domain names that have sold for the highest prices. It’s astounding what people are willing to pay for a good domain name.

Now, some additional points that were made in regards to buying domain names:

Make sure you get a .com if you can. If not, get a .co.uk or .de or some other first world country designation.

If you speak a foreign language, get the .com for that name. For example, the Arab equivalent of download.com just sold for $2500 dollars, a minuscule amount given it’s potential. Think Hindi names or maybe even Swahili or Ibo names (they’re a lot of Nigerians out there).

Go local — if you can’t get Nairobi.com, go for neighborhoods within Nairobi like Kileleshwa.com or Muthaiga.com; avoid the .co.ke if you can.

Basically, the point here, is that this thing is still wide open and if you are creative enough, you can get a good name that will be valuable one day because everything is moving on-line.

Here is the list of the highest selling domain names:

business.com, $7,500,000, 1999
diamond.com, $7,500,000, 2006
asseenontv.com, $5,000,000, 2000
korea.com, $5,000,000, 2000
altavista.com, $3,350,000, 1998
loans.com, $3,000,000, 2000
vodka.com, $3,000,000, 2006
wine.com, $3,000,000, 1999
creditcards.com, $2,750,000, 2004
autos.com, $2,200,000, 1999
express.com, $2,000,000, 1999
mortgage.com**, $1,800,000, 2000
cameras.com, $1,500,000, 2006
tandberg.com, $1,500,000, 2007
men.com, $1,300,000, 2003
bingo.com, $1,100,000, 1999
wallstreet.com, $1,030,000, 1999
fish.com, $1,020,000, 2005
beauty.cc, $1,000,000, 2000
if.com, $1,000,000, 2000
linux.com, $1,000,000, 1999
rock.com, $1,000,000, 1998
topix.com, $1,000,000, 2007
bills.com, $964,500, 2005
forsalebyowner.com, $835,000, 2000

** The name Zimbabwe.com was sold for $300,000 dollars.

So, this is one business idea that won’t cost you a lot of money, but it will require a bit of creativity on your part.

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hash

February 10, 2009 at 10:01 pm

Don’t overlook obvious .co.ke domains too. Some good ones are still easy to find, though they do cost a ridiculous $50/year.

#103160

kenyanentrepreneur

February 11, 2009 at 1:16 am

Hash:

You could be right about the .ke names because I remember reading about this Chinese guy who is capitalizing on buying all the .cm names and surprisingly, people who forget to type in .com and type in .cm are all redirected to this one page that is full of ads, which millions of people are clicking on and which in turn earns him millions of dollars in ad revenues. The .cm by the way, is owned by the Cameronian government and this guy has a deal with them!

They’re a whole bunch of other country names mentioned in the article below:

Oman .om
ethiopia . et
Niger .ne

Link to article here:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines.....100050989/

This guys domain name empire is now worth a reported $300 million dollars.

#103162

Ole Mibei

February 11, 2009 at 1:39 am

KE,

I thought one has to go through a legal process to check if the selected name is valid and register it through a lawyer…

Since you have done it, whats the procedure ? ..

This is like a lottery man…..

#103164

February 11, 2009 at 1:01 pm

Ole Mibei:

You don’t need a lawyer.

You simply have to go through a domain registry and type in a name you are thinking about. The registry will tell you if that name is available or not. If it is, they’ll give you the option to register it immediately.

They are a number of different domain registries, but the most popular one is:
godaddy.com. So, this is where you’ll begin your search.

link: http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx

The best blog to learn more about the domain name industry is a blog called sevenmile.com and it’s written by a guy who’s made millions buying and selling domains.

Link here:
http://www.sevenmile.com/

#103166

James

February 12, 2009 at 4:20 am

Hi KE.I have followed your site for a long time.I’m glad that you have come back to money matters and less politics.

I’m a very young dude,from an IT background, have been lucky to work in a company that does web hosting & domain registration. I decided i have learnt enough and now i’m in the process of setting up web hosting and domain reg services.

I was just wondering,why did you decide to move from a blogger account to a .com?

#103176

KKK

February 12, 2009 at 9:29 am

I like where you are going with this blog but i have three words for you… dot com bubble… look at most of the dates of the major pay-outs, 1999 2000 etc, dont forget that this was just all based around buzz and hype and all were over priced, dont expect to get that kind of cash these days.
I would advice peeps to get more creative… domains are old news, try looking into 2nd life real estate, this has more future potential.

#103179

Kei O

February 12, 2009 at 12:11 pm

I agree with you on this one.

Virtual reality in Africa is virtually virgin territory. Virtual entrepreneurs have barely scratched the surface of this virgin territory (pun unintended).

Can you imagine what life will be like when Africa is finally virtually connected? Can you dare dream what it will be like in 20 years time?

I see a great harvest. Thats what I see……

#103180

February 12, 2009 at 2:12 pm

James:
I decided to move from a free blogger account to my own hosted server account because I wanted to have more control over the way my site was designed and the features that I could offer to my readers.

KKK:
The dot.com bubble does not apply to domain names. It applies to those companies in the 90’s that thought that all you had to do was put the letters .com in front of a name and you had a real company.

While you may not be able to sell a name for those prices above, what you could do is develop a site and put ad’s on it and that’s where lot’s of people who have good names are making money (off the ad’s). And if you look at the dates more closely, you’ll see that names like vodka.com, diamond.com and cameras.com were sold in 2006 – that was just 3 years ago.

The guy who bought the name chocolate.com is doing something similar. All these large chocolate vendors like Godiva are selling their chocolates through his site and paying him a commission and he doesn’t even have to worry about shipping the products because they’ll do it for him. It’s like renting a property, but without having to deal with the headaches of repairs and broken pipes and all that. (Read that blog sevenmile.com).

Anyway, tell me more about this 2nd life real estate. I’ve looked into it, but couldn’t figure it out. It sounds like building a second life site would require quite a bit of development work.

Kei O;
I don’t know how much virgin territory is left in Africa because you’d be surprised just how many kenyan names have already been taken. I think every big city and town name in Kenya has already been registered.

They also say that when thinking about a name to register, think about the names of commercial products that people will always want to buy, but don’t get hung up on buying one word names because those have mostly been taken. So, if you can’t get Nairobi.com, try a name like Nairobibars.com; nairobihotels.com, etc, etc…what they call long tail words. i.e. the name of a town or city combined with the name of a product or service.

#103181