Recently Tiffany and I decided it was time to search for a vegas condo, we spend enough time in the area so it had become beneficial to find a condo in Las Vegas rather than continue to float in and out of hotels, as much as we love the Aria something more permanent was in order.
As we started the search we had reached out to our good friends at DotVegas who lead us to the leader in Vegas condo sales, who happens to be using LasVegasHomes.Vegas, which was a great sign as we have invested in several top tier .Vegas domains. We also found out he has plans to develop a few other real estate related .Vegas domain names.
But this got us searching further, we had seen several .Vegas domains in use during our trips to the area, we quickly found the street level penetration of .Vegas was strong. This validated what we had seen elsewhere with gTLDs. Not all domain investors may be a fans but end users are.
We had already been in contact with the people that own Bacon.Vegas, as well as several others, with a bit more looking it became clear that it was more than one or two people we have to run into using them, there were random sightings without even trying.
We did finally select a location in Downtown Las Vegas, at The Ogden (home of Todd Bridges from Different Strokes and Tony Hsieh, Zappos Founder and head of the Downtown Project). After talking with several people during the process we learned that the Las Vegas real estate market is saturated but opportunity exists to stand out for both rentals as well as selling. Many of the sites people are using are either outdated or use horrible domain names. This lead us to a decision, research buying Condo.Vegas and Condos.Vegas. Which we did.
From a domain name perspective, the return we can get from a great gTLD based domain name like Condo.Vegas and Condos.Vegas is much better than what we would get from investing in the .COM related to either, now please, do not misunderstand that, I will always say .COM rocks and if you are in a place where the investment justifies the spend and does not keep the business from running as a whole do it. But in a case like this Condo.Vegas is a much better investment than a huge .COM buy or using a really crappy .COM that could be hand registered.
Based on this buy we have formed partnerships with two different real estate firms in Las Vegas. We will be splitting usage of the domains into one being focused primarily on Vegas condo sales and the other on Vegas condo short term rentals (i.e. Airbnb, VRBO). Being able to hit both markets is key for us.
It is great to see usage of .Vegas continue to grow, it made it an easy decision to step out of looking at this purchase as a domain investor and more like an end user. I expect we will be making further acquisitions based on the same ideas, and look forward to posting about them and also posting about discussions we will be having with gTLD users and their thoughts behind the branding they get from making the jump from a crappy, long, .COM they may have had, to a quality, readable, and memorable, gTLD.
The real Condo.Vegas billboard in Las Vegas