nar wins rights to sell new tad .realestateRecently NAR announced that they had “won the rights” to offer .realtor as a top level domain. Today they have announced they have also garnered control of .realestate as an additional TLD service offering. They said that “business rules” and pricing of the domain would be available in Q2 2015. Over the past few years a slew new TLD’s have been provided to registrars, none have created the kind of “land rush” that was expected. You’ll certainly see the first half million .realtor domains go fast, NAR is offering them for free.

Of all the stakeholders in trademarks, I would guess NAR has been the most aggressive and most effective in protecting their intellectual property position, rightfully so. It will be interesting to see how stringent the “business rules” will be for establishing a .realestate domain and it’s “wider business purposes”. It would seem, like .com, .org and .net, anyone can register the domains for whatever legal purpose they want to pursue. The words real estate are used for a lot more than defining real property.