A new record appears to have been set for the purchase of property-related internet domain names.

US Mortgage company Lending Tree has announced the sale of Realestate.com and a number of other domains to Market Leader, a real estate marketing firm, for total price of US $8.25 million.  

As the sale includes “existing business relationships” with a network of brokers and other sites, it is impossible to calculate the exact amount actually paid for www.realestate.com.   Interestingly, domain news service Domains.com believes Lemon Tree could have achieved a price of up to $25 million if it had sold through a public auction.

Realestate.com is undoubtably the most valuable domain name in the property world as it is not only short and memorable but “real estate” is the most searched for property phrase globally on Google.  The .com extension is disproportionately valuable and the majority of people (especially in the US) assume a website ends in .com and it therefore difficult to build a US brand on any other domain extension.

To put the sale into perspective the record for a domain name sale in any category is $12 million for sex.com, followed by fund.com ($10 million) and porn.com ($9.5 million).

“Real estate” (exact match) gets 1.22 million searches month.  www.realestate.com ranks top for this phrase. On a simple and conservative assumption that every click is worth $0.10, it will take Market Leader just over five years to pay back the investment.

It looks like a good piece of business.