Your domain names are a portfolio — start treating them like one

Four years ago I sold my first brokerage, The Address. I was proud of that name — clean, confident, and it meant something. Our tagline said it best: “It’s more than a collection of numbers and words. It’s a place that you call home.”

This year the national trademark on it expired, and I decided not to renew it. It’s not a name I’m ever going to use again. Once I made peace with that, I realized it was finally time to part with the domains that came with it, too — AddressRealEstate.com, SellingTheAddress.com and AddressEstates.com. 

Good names that are now doing absolutely nothing but generating an annual invoice, so it’s time to sell them.

When I went to look at what else was in the account, it got embarrassing.

There was RealEstateRenaissance.com, which I bought on pure impulse. It was available — available! — and I couldn’t believe it. A two-word, on-trend .com that practically markets itself. I clicked “buy” before I’d finished the thought. 

Two years later, I have never used it. Not a landing page, not a redirect, not a single email. What I have done is pay the renewal, right on schedule.

If you’ve been in real estate for more than a few years, you probably have domain names like these. We’re a creative, opportunistic industry, and a clever domain feels like staking a claim. 

But a folder full of unused domains isn’t a strategy — it’s a subscription you forgot to cancel. GoDaddy gets their money whether you build something or not. So let’s talk about the whole lifecycle: what to buy, what to skip and what to do with the names already sitting in your account.

Before you buy, run the 4-question gut check

The purchase is the cheap, dopamine-rich part. Before you click, answer four questions honestly:

• Do you actually need it? “Need” is different from “cool.” A domain you can’t tie to a specific plan is a hobby, not an asset.
• Are you going to use it? Be brutal. “Someday” is not a launch date.
• When, specifically, will you use it? If you can’t name a quarter, you’re not buying a domain — you’re renting optimism.
• Are you buying to hold and resell? Domain investing is real, but it’s a different business with different math, and you should know you’re in it before you’re 12 renewals deep.

If you hold a domain for five years at $20 a year, you’re all-in around $100 before you’ve sold a thing. Hold 10 names for a decade, and you’ve spent a couple thousand dollars betting that someone, someday, wants what you grabbed on a whim. 

Sometimes that bet pays off. Most of the time it funds your registrar’s holiday party. 

The domains you should own

Not every purchase is speculative. A handful are genuinely defensive, and every agent should own them:

• Your name. JaneSmith.com or JaneSmithRealEstate.com. You’re the brand that follows you from brokerage to brokerage. Own it.
• Your name, misspelled. Buy the common misspellings of your name and business for security. Look-alike domains are how bad actors spoof your email and phish your clients mid-transaction.
• Your city or farm area. The market you sell in. For example: DowntownAustinHomes.com.
• Your .realestate domain. Don’t forget the industry’s own extension. Grabbing yourname.realestate rounds out your identity and keeps a competitor from planting a flag on the version buyers increasingly recognize.

I recently sat down with Alex Shakhov, who runs SH Consulting, an email deliverability and security firm working with some of the biggest teams in the business. “When you buy a new domain name,” he said, “you have zero security protection. And that’s your responsibility to make sure your domain name is being fully protected from scams and phishing.”

“Literally, every single person in the world can send emails from your domain name, from your email account, without even having access to your account,” he added. “This is basic spoofing.”

When Shakhov’s team worked with Gary Ashton’s 250-agent group, they recommended buying around 200 look-alike domains — the two-R-versus-one-R versions, the ones with a period between the names, the common misspellings — specifically so a scammer couldn’t register them and impersonate a team member. 

Owning the name is Step 1; configuring it so that it can’t be spoofed is the step almost nobody takes. Whether you hire someone or follow a walkthrough yourself, do not skip it.

Once you own your name, use it. Emailing clients from yourname@gmail.com — or worse, @aol.com or @hotmail.com — tells people you’re either brand new or not paying attention, while jane@janesmithrealestate.com looks like a professional who’s built something. 

That means your Gmail can go back to being where your kid’s soccer schedule and your Amazon receipts live, and your business email becomes its own clean, searchable, brand-forward inbox.

You don’t have to give up Gmail to do it. Point your domain email at Google Workspace and keep the exact interface, app and features you already know — just send and receive as jane@janesmithrealestate.com instead of a generic address. Same Gmail experience, professional face.

What do you actually own, and what’s it worth?

Which brings me back to The Address. Buying was easy. Deciding what to keep, what to sell and what to walk away from means knowing how to value a domain and how to sell one.

Domain valuation is not an exact science — a name is worth what a buyer will pay, and not a cent more until that buyer appears. But you can triangulate a realistic range:

• Automated appraisals: Run each name through GoDaddy’s appraisal tool and Estibot for an algorithmic estimate. Treat these as a starting point, not gospel; they’re often optimistic.
• Comparable sales: Search NameBio, the historical sales database, for names similar to yours in keyword, length and extension. What did comparable .coms actually sell for in the last year or two? Brandable names span a wide band from a hundred bucks to several thousand.
• The retail-vs-wholesale gap: There are two prices: the number you ask on a marketplace and the number a domain investor will quick-flip you are worlds apart — often 5x to 10x. A name you’d list at $2,500 might fetch $300 in a fire sale. Neither is “wrong”; they’re different buyers.
• Find the end user: The highest price always comes from someone who wants that exact name for their brand. My AddressRealEstate.com is worth far more to a brokerage already branded “Address” than to a flipper. Identify the buyer who benefits most, and sell to them directly.

How to actually sell

Once you have a range, put the names where buyers look:

• List on the marketplaces. Afternic and Dan.com plug into the GoDaddy buying network and reach the widest audience. Sedo is strong internationally. Set a buy-now price and enable make-offer so you catch both the impulse buyer and the negotiator.
• Do direct outreach. For your best names, don’t wait — email the businesses that would benefit most. A short, warm note to a matched end user beats any marketplace algorithm.
• Price to move what you don’t love. Your weaker names aren’t retirement funds. Price them to sell, recover your renewal fees and stop the bleeding.
• Or let them go. Sometimes the smartest ROI move is to simply not renew a name nobody will ever buy. Killing a dead domain is a decision, too.

Buying domains is easy. The discipline is in the follow-through: knowing what you own, why you own it, what it’s worth and when it’s time to hand it to someone who’ll actually build on it.

I’m taking my own advice now, one name at a time — starting with The Address. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a name you love is sell it to someone ready to use it.

Just don’t let it sit in a folder for a decade first. GoDaddy’s holiday party is nice enough without your help.