Teresa Boardman wrote a piece on Inman.com where she expressed her desire to control her own destiny, not stand with the pack, and stick with .com over the new .realtor extension. I tend to agree with Teresa that the domain names should be more about the real estate she is showcasing and not about her.
In the article Teresa wrote:
I tried to buy com.realtor, but of course that’s not allowed. NAR requires that you use your first, last or full name in your .realtor domain.
NAR will let me buy “teresaboardman.realtor” or “sellTeresa.realtor.” Unless I point my .realtor domain name to my own website, it will direct traffic to a realtor.com “profile website.”
I think I’ll just stick with my .com domains. I can have domain names like StPaulRealEstateBlog.com and StPaulCondolife.com and StPaulPhotos.com and several others that don’t include my name, or the words sell or sold. The domain names are more about real estate, not about me.
Maybe someday the whole .com thing will make it even easier to stand out and show up on the Internet. Some Realtors have a kind of herd mentality. As a group, we are not the most Internet-savvy people on the planet. Agents often want to hang out on the websites where the other real estate agents hang out because they believe that is where the business is and that bigger is somehow better.
Read the full article on Inman.com
Quite often realtors will use their first/last name + .COM or perhaps last name + realty to market their listings. It can seem to be a waste of time trying to market a relevant city + real estate domain to realtors even though the sales commission on one listing would pay for the cost of the domain.
Her comments make sense i think
I am surprised that so many Realtors including Teresa Boardman don’t understand what a .Realtor domain name does that no .com domain name does including a city+RealEstate.com. any scammer can buy a city+RealEstate.com and use it to defraud the public(and that happens a lot) but a . Realtor domain can only be registered by a Realtor, so owning your name.Realtor domain gives you credibility that you are indeed in the Real Estate business.