The ultra premium domain name Land.com has been purchased by CoStar Realty Information, Inc. according to whois records who also goes by CoStar Group and is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ (CSGP) and has a market cap of almost $7 Billion Dollars.
CoStar is no stranger to premium generic domain names as they also own Apartment.com and Apartments.com.
According to Wikipedia: “CoStar Group, Inc. is an American commercial real estate information and marketing provider with headquarters in Washington, DC. The company has approximately 2,500 employees.”
In April 2014, CoStar Group Inc completed the acquisition of Apartments.com for $585 million as reported by the WashingtonPost.com
According to Forbes.com: CoStar Group is #15 on the Forbes Innovative Growth Companies List with a $6.5 Billion Enterprise Value although the market cap is now higher.
The domain name was owned by? That is a bit of a question as the domain name was listed in whois as owned by DomainCapital.com since 2008 and then on June 22, 2015 changed registrants to Ari Goldberger of Esqwire.com. Then on July 17, 2015 whois records shows Cyntia King of Marksmen, Inc. Marksmen is a domain buy service. Name servers changed to Comlaude.com also at that time.
Digging a bit further back into whois history records, Anything.com had owned Land.com in 2008 prior to registrants changing to DomainCapital.com on September 30, 2008 and DomainCapital.com was shown as the registrant all the way up to the June 22, 2015 registrant change to Ari.
Land.com has been registered since April 29, 1993.
Here is the updated whois record showing CoStar Group as the new owners of the domain name.
According to CoStarGroup.com they have the brands: CoStar.com, Apartments.com, BizBuySell.com, LoopNet.com, Showcase.com, CityFeet.com, ShopProperty.co.uk and LandAndFarm.com to mention a few.
I have reached out to Ari Goldberger for comment but have not heard back yet at time of publication.
The transaction involving apartments.com include some other 2 websites with $86million in revenue.
For me it’s about the foundations, love the game.
Awesome news for generic .com’s.
That’s a huge name to own 🙂 , love it, congrats to buyer & seller!
It would be more interesting if we know how much was involved in the deal.
That’s not the only Anything.com owned domain that switched over to Domain Capital. I’ve noticed several. I wonder if Anything borrowed money against the value of certain domains a few years back. Seems to be the case.