The buyers of Property.com & Properties.com were the owners of Condo.com & Houses.com.
This is the buyers' press release:
Condo.com & Houses.com, two leading online residential real estate portals, today announced the acquisition of the category domain names: Property.com and Properties.com. Property.com is well-positioned to succeed as the Companyâs third real estate portal, differentiated by the additional property types offered within the massive commercial real estate market. In addition to a comprehensive database of residential inventory, the site will showcase office space, retail properties, multi-family buildings, warehouses, industrial space and land from all over the world.
Richard Swerdlow, CEO of Condo.com, Houses.com and now Property.com stated âthe acquisition made perfect sense for us. We are now able to leverage our online real estate platform, licensing and team to expand into the broader global commercial property market â including office, retail, industrial and land. It is exciting to have the opportunity to create leading online real estate portals across all property types, satisfying a growing global demand from property owners, buyers and sellers that are increasingly using the web for property searches.â The commercial real estate market is one of the largest asset classes in the United States with over $11 trillion in value and the potential size of the marketing and data services industry for commercial real estate professionals is approximately $30 billion. âWe hope to secure market share through the use of our platform and category domain expertise,â he added. The combination doubles the companyâs potential market size.
The domains were acquired from Rick Schwartz, an entrepreneur known as the âDomain Kingâ who previously sold Candy.com, iReport.com and other high-trafficked domains, and who also puts on a leading domain name industry trade show. Owning the category domain name provides traffic, enhanced name recall and brand credibility that would otherwise take years to build. Schwartz stated âit was only a matter of time before these domains ended up in the right hands. I am very happy to be partners with the Condo.com and Houses.com team and know that with the proper execution of their plan for the domains, we will have an extremely valuable web asset.â Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is well-timed with the momentum in the online real estate market, including Zillowâs (Nasdaq: Z) successful IPO today.
Well done, Rickâ¦Just a terrific deal, by the sound of itâ¦
...And, an example to us all, because its a great example of how to leverage value from a domain asset by showing how a domain is not simply a web address â a thing to be âdevelopedâ â but, an integral part of the core strategy of an organisationâ¦.and therefore worth a great deal.
TheLegendaryJP said:
To me it is about the valuation change from $15M to $4M no matter how you dice it up is a major cut, stock options or not.
Don't agree with you there, JP - now that we see who the buyers are...
Rick has already banked his $4m cash....Its likely that his equity would not unreasonably be around an additional 3%-5%.....His partners in this are already known, established, and successful, in the online real estate business.....This deal could easily be worth
an additional $11m in revenue share to Rick - or much more - over 10 years, or so.
...
PLUS we haven't even talked yet about 3%-5% of a potential
IPO, for the
Property.com component of an IPO for the property group of
Condo.com, Houses.com, and Property.com, down the track, when the property market recovers (remember - these guys will sell & represent property/land
globally).
...This deal ($4m cash + 3%-5% Revenue share + 3%-5% of an eventual IPO) could be worth $40 million to Rick in a few years time....Or, frankly, any number north of that you could reasonably think of!
....Meantime, with the $4 million cash already banked, he's already multiplied his investment on the 2 names by
4.8 times (
PLUS whatever he's made over the years during the good parking days) - and counting...!!
Any way you look at it, JP....Rick's done a sensational deal on his investment in these names.