US portals condo.com and houses.com will soon add another website to their network, announcing the acquisition of domain names property.com and properties.com for an undisclosed sum.
houses.com was launched as a sister website to condo.com in January, and property.com is now set to go live in the fourth quarter of this year. condo.com says this portal will offer a residential inventory, along with listings for office space, retail properties, multi-family buildings, warehouses, industrial space and land from around the world.
“The acquisition made perfect sense for us,” says Richard Swerdlow, CEO of the three websites. “We are now able to leverage our online real estate platform, licensing and team to expand into the broader global commercial property market – including office, retail, industrial and land.”
“We hope to secure market share through the use of our platform and category domain expertise,” Swerdlow added, stating that the combination doubles his company’s potential market size.
The domains were acquired from Rick Schwartz, an entrepreneur known as the “Domain King” who previously sold candy.com, ireport.com and other high-traffic domains.
“It was only a matter of time before these domains ended up in the right hands,” Schwartz says. “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.”
condo.com claims it sees over 1 million visitors per month. It last appeared in the Hitwise list of US real estate websites in March this year, when it dropped from from 99th to 101st place.
