Buy your .realty domain today

A .realty domain is used almost entirely by the retail end of the industry. Independent brokerages and agent teams make up the bulk of it, and the registrar mix confirms the picture, with the holdings concentrated at ordinary consumer registrars rather than at corporate brand-protection agents.

Listing portals and marketplaces make up the remainder, including at least one covering international sales. No franchise brand or major national portal appeared among the developed sites, so this is a small-and-independent neighborhood rather than a corporate one.

No, a .realty domain has no eligibility requirement whatsoever. The registry agreement contains no eligibility clause, no credential test and no community specification, so registration is open to anyone anywhere.

That is the single biggest difference between this extension and the one people confuse it with, and it is worth being clear about before you compare prices. Nothing about holding a .realty name says anything about your license status.

The difference is that .realtor is genuinely restricted and .realty is not. REALTOR is a trademark, and the registry that runs .realtor operates it in partnership with the National Association of Realtors, stating that only members of that association and its Canadian counterpart may use the term and that only Realtors are allowed to use the .realtor domain.

Importantly, that restriction comes from registry policy and trademark law rather than from any ICANN requirement, so it is a private rule enforced by the operator. .realty carries no equivalent, which means it is available to any agent, team or brokerage regardless of association membership.

So the choice is about what you can claim. If you are a member and want the association signal, .realtor carries it. If you are not, or you simply want a descriptive address, .realty says real estate without asserting anything you have not earned.

Only if you are a member, because REALTOR is a trademark rather than a general term for an estate agent. The association that owns it restricts the term to its own members, which is why the matching extension is gated and why using the word in your own name or advertising without membership invites a complaint.

This is a separate question from which extension you register. A .realty address is free of that issue entirely, since realty is an ordinary descriptive word that nobody owns. If you are a member and want to use the term, check your association guidelines on how it may appear.

Generally the rules govern your advertising content rather than your address. The Texas regulator publishes a direct answer to this, stating that it does not consider URLs or email addresses to be advertisements in and of themselves, while adding that an advertisement containing a sales agent URL with a title implying responsibility for a brokerage does breach its rules.

Two practical points follow. The same regulator also notes that it does not vet assumed names or team names for exclusivity, so clearing a name is your job rather than theirs. And because an address can still make an advertisement misleading when read as a whole, the safe course is a .realty name that does not imply a brokerage role you do not hold.

Choose .realty for the business of selling and .estate for the property itself. Realty is the American trade word for real estate as an activity, which makes it a natural fit for a brokerage or an agent team, while estate reads more like the asset and carries a second meaning around estate planning and probate.

On availability the two differ sharply. .estate holds several times as many names as .realty, so more of the obvious words there are taken. .properties and .property are the other two to check if your name is gone in both. Given how steep the .realty renewal is, price both before you decide, because the cheaper extension may also be the cheaper commitment.

A .realty domain is one of the sharpest examples of a promotional first year in the whole domain market, with the cheapest opening price at some sellers a small fraction of what the same name costs to renew. The renewal can run more than twenty times the first-year figure.

So treat the opening price as irrelevant and compare renewals. Work out the five-year cost before you commit, check the renewal at several sellers because they vary widely, and if the address is going on signage and business cards, price it as a long-term line item rather than a cheap experiment.

Yes, .realty is the smallest of the main real estate extensions, holding well under two thousand names worldwide. For comparison, .realtor holds many times more and the largest property extension holds a hundred times more.

Small has a real upside here, which is that good names remain genuinely available, including short ones that vanished elsewhere years ago. The offset is recognition: few buyers will have seen the extension, so your address will do its own explaining, and pairing it with consistent listing profiles matters more than it would on a familiar extension.