Steve”

Cant wait to hear what you have to say about the geo real estate niche.

Great idea for a blog / source for geo domain information. Anytime a company like Marchex spends over 150 million to obtain one of the best geo targeted domain portfolios you have a interesting space.

Interestingly, I own digitalpreneur.com which is a name I would coin similar to geopreneur.com. Looking forward to more of your blog. Good luck in the New Year…

Congrats on SimplyGeo.com…you could not have chosen a better entry point to start blogging. I’ve been
registering geo-domains for about six years. My niche is mainly neighborhood names, streets, islands, and well
known shopping districts. Here’s how I stumbled into the geo domain category…

I took a job transfer and relocated to Miami in 2001. After about six months of apartment life, my wife and I
started to search different neighborhoods for a home.

We found a realtor/agent that drove us around every Sunday to open houses. After a month of “open house Sundays” and no luck finding a home, I stopped this ritual…convinced that I could save time by finding a home online.

I started with the local mls/realtor.com sites. What a disappointment! These sites restricted my search to
zip codes…meaning that I could not target specific neighborhoods…therefore spending hours searching
through tons of crap.

When we would finally find a property description that fit our taste and price range ($250k-300K), it would
have a single, grainy thumbnail photo or no photo at all.

This peaked my interests to see what marketing features were offered for the million dollar property listings. So, I set my price to $1 million and above. To my surprise, the search returned 60 to 70 homes listed at $1mil or above that did not have a single property photo or detailed property description.

My next step was to research these high-dollar neighborhoods via the search engines and direct navigation. I thought for sure that these “luxury real estate agents” would all have web sites pertaining to the neighborhoods that they heavily advertised every Sunday in the Miami Herald. Again to my surprise, nothing!

That’s when my geo-domain vision was born. My immediate thoughts were…”if real estate agents and brokers were willing to pay $150-$400 dollars a week for an small, un-targeted text ad in the local paper then they would surely pay to have these luxury listings showcased on highly targeted neighborhood name web sites.

So I started registering the domain names that were relevant to well-known neighborhoods, desired streets, islands, and districts.

I built a few very simple web sites on five of the domains…just to see what would happen. I was absolutely blown away by the statistics. I could not believe how many potential homebuyers were navigating directly to the sites or being sent from the search engines. I started receiving emails from people looking for info on “available homes” in these neighborhoods.

I also started to receive emails from real estate agents and brokers offering $150-$500 for many of the domains. I declined them all and provided my reasons for declining….”why would I sell a domain name for peanuts that delivers the most targeted traffic available to your million dollar listings? The sell of a single million dollar home can generate 60k in commissions.

So, what is the value of a domain name that can deliver these buyers over and over again?

I’m sorry for the long post…I get kinda carried away when I think about the potential of the geo-niche and how
early we are in this game.

I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to read and learn from blogs like SimplyGeo.com and the experiences of each poster… Btw, I’m in the process off building out my network of sites…no more PPC for me.

geopreneur,

Jeff

**SMO**

Thanks Jeff for the kind words. I really appreciate you sharing your insights. Don’t worry about the long post. It’s all good! How else will readers learn, in two sentence posts? =) I will be covering the realestate portion in detail in the coming weeks. Love the signature!

Steve

Love the concept, the subject, and the information that I am sure I can take away from here.

Coming late to the geo name game, I have still managed to get into some fine geos.

Looks like a great place to network and cross promote.

I think if we treat this subject matter purely for what it is, a geo forum, and not rule anything out then I think we can all benefit from it.

I also read earlier that your wife is a real estate agent in NC. I am also in NC and hope to have some mobile sites up before too long.

Would be glad to include links to her.

Gerry

**SMO**

Gerry,

Thanks for visiting the blog and for the kind words.

I hope to keep the blog 100% neutral and focused on the geo niche. The blog will be a place to discuss geo domains regardless of the extention and network. All prime geo domains have value, it is how the owners develop them, that will determine the extent of that value. We all can learn a thing or two if we keep an open mind.

Thanks for the offer, but my wife was a realestate agent in Austin, Tx, not in N.C.

Happy Holidays!
Steve

**SMO**

I made the word up today michael, and I went to register it before I published it on the blog. Only to find out the name was registered back in Mar 2006. It is amazing that even made up words are registered. lol This is exactly what businesses go thru. I did register Geopreneurs.com this morning. I could have made up another word to get the singular dot com name, but if you really think about it, there is no other word that really describes an individual in this niche better, geopreneur says it all imo. The more you read into the name, the more it makes sense. A totally new word. Only 29 hits on google.

Steve