Weekend Musings: Virtual vs. Physical Real Estate

Morgan Linton - Southbeach

It has been a busy couple of weeks and I had a blast in Florida last week, South Beach pictured above. I stayed at a cool hotel at 8th and Washington called “Hotel Clinton” which of course can be photographed to look like, “Hotel Linton” which was a nice plus.

Hotel Linton

I closed one end-user domain sale last week and have one more that should finish next week. In 2012 I’m all about selling a few domains/month for a much higher average price per domain. This week I have a new staff member starting that will be working specifically with our end-user sales deals since this has grown considerably over the last year. I do get a lot of brokerage requests but just want to re-iterate for the zillionth time, I am not a domain broker, I do know some great domain brokers and am happy to recommend them to you!

I had a chance to catch-up with the .CO crew while I was in Miami, it’s pretty exciting to see how well they’re doing. More and more startups are building their brands on .CO domains, here’s a few cool ones that caught my eye:

Right now the team is getting ready to head-off to SXSW and meet with lots of awesome startups building their brands on .CO. Please note that .CO is not sponsor of this blog at the moment so I am not being paid to say this. I know there has been a lot of controversy lately over the Overstock discussion of O.co. I don’t want to gloss over this, but at the same time this is just one example and I can tell you there are some kick-ass startups building kick-ass brands on .CO, period.

I don’t see many other TLD owners getting out in front of the startup community, encouraging growth, and making an impact. With the startup world growing like crazy I see .CO in a great place, I don’t think it’s a domain investor’s paradise though. This really isn’t the TLD that you want to own tons of domains in, there just isn’t the demand. This is a great TLD if you are a startup that doesn’t have a six or seven-figure budget but does want to brand around their first choice name.

South Beach

Today we are continuing our condo hunting in Santa Monica. We’ve been looking at some great options and have it narrowed down to a handful of options. I’ve found a lot of similarities between domain investing and real estate investing, or at least some fun parallels. I think of each area or zip code like a TLD. The best Ocean-front real estate is .COM, a few blocks behind that is the .NET and .ORGs, get too far out and you’re hitting the .INFO’s.

Since we are planning on living in this condo for a few years and then renting it out we want to make sure we’re in .COM turf. These are areas that always rent and command the highest rental prices. This also means that we’ll pay more for a place than just about anywhere else in LA, but people always pay more for .COM’s right?

I would also rather buy a .COM with a crappy website than a .NET with a great website if it’s the domain I’m after. I feel the same about condos. When we walk into a condo that’s just been completely remodeled I feel like I’m paying a premium for something that somebody else picked-out. I would much rather have a place that is a better price and an open slate for us to create exactly what we want.

Every Sunday we now attend “Sunday Opens” in Santa Monica where we get to look at tons of open houses. It’s been a lot of fun and in about twenty minutes we’ll be getting started! I hope you are all having a great weekend! Please feel free to add your own weekend musings below!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton