# Running a market TLD for real estate: who it serves and how
> For operators considering a TLD that names real estate: who would hold a name under it, what they would use it for, and what running it involves.
Source: https://hush.partners/running-a-market-tld-for-real-estate
Category: Acquiring
Published by Hush Partners.
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Real estate transactions are built on local knowledge, professional reputation, and a closing process that brings together many parties who have never worked with each other before. Each of those characteristics creates a problem that a well-run namespace can address. The question you have to answer before acquiring a sector TLD is not whether the sector is large. It is whether the people inside it would register a name, use it for something specific, and keep it.
This article works through that question without flattering the answer. It covers who would hold a name under a real estate TLD, what each type of holder would use it for, how the two natural kinds of names follow the structure of the sector, where a namespace earns its keep in the transaction chain, and what you take on as the operator. It ends with a worked revenue example and a realistic first year. By the end you should be able to judge whether this sector justifies an acquisition for you.
A short reminder of the terms. An onchain TLD is an ending such as `.yoursector` recorded on a blockchain instead of in the DNS. A name under it, such as `name.yoursector`, can point to a wallet (the software that holds the keys to a blockchain address) or to a website.
## Who would hold a name, and why
Four kinds of professionals have a plausible reason to hold a name. They do not have the same reason, and they will not register at the same pace.
| Holder type | Primary use | Secondary use |
|---|---|---|
| Agency or brokerage | Identity of the firm that others can check | Receiving commissions |
| Individual agent | Professional identity that moves with the agent | A payment address on marketing material |
| Developer or fund | One identifier for a development or a portfolio | Communications with investors |
| Property manager | Identity for a managed portfolio | Payments from tenants and to contractors |
**Agencies and brokerages** are the most natural first clients. A firm with many agents wants one identifier that behaves the same way everywhere it is used: when it receives a commission, when it sends payment instructions, when a client checks an address before sending funds. A name under `.yoursector` that points to the firm's wallet is easier for a person to read and compare than a long string of characters, and it carries the vetting you did when you issued it.
**Individual agents** have a different motivation. An agent may work under several brokerages over a career, and the email address and web page supplied by each firm stay with the firm. A name issued to the agent stays with the agent and points wherever the agent directs it. In a sector where reputation is personal and much business comes by referral, an identity that does not depend on the current employer has value of its own.
**Developers and funds** benefit from a name for each project. Consider, as an invented case, a mid-sized residential developer building a development in stages in a single city. One name for that development can serve as its identifier across investor updates, sales documents and the payments made when units are sold. The name is useful for the life of the development and of little use afterward, which matters for how you price it and how long you expect it to be kept.
**Property managers** handle the most payments. A firm that manages a portfolio of buildings deals with rent, maintenance invoices, utilities and contractors' fees continuously. A name that leads to the right entity for the right building reduces mistakes. This group also watches its costs closely, so the case for a name rests on time saved in matching payments to buildings, and you should expect to be asked to show it.
### Where demand is weak
Three limits belong in your assessment before any revenue model.
First, the buyer and the seller of a home are not your registrants. They pass through the market once every several years and have no reason to hold a name. Your market is the professionals around them, which is a much smaller group than the number of transactions suggests.
Second, a name is only as useful as the number of counterparties who check it. An agent whose clients, lenders and lawyers have never heard of the namespace gains little from a name in the short term. The early value is concentrated in groups that already deal with each other repeatedly: the agents of one brokerage, the members of one association, the contractors of one property manager.
Third, for a public website the DNS is simply better. An agent's site has to open in every browser for every prospective client, and an onchain name does not do that. A name under your TLD complements a conventional domain; it does not replace it.
## Listings and agents: the two natural kinds of names
A real estate namespace tends to organize itself around two distinct objects: a property, and the professional responsible for it. Treating them as separate categories in your issuance policy saves confusion later.
A **listing name** is attached to a specific property or development: a name built from a street address, for example, or from the name of a development. It is held by the agency, the developer or the property manager, and it is used as a reference in documents, as a payment destination or for a page about the property. It is useful while the listing or the development is active. You have to decide whether listing names are priced differently from professional names, and what your rules say happens to them once the property is sold or let.
A **professional name** is attached to a person or a firm: the name of an agent, or the trading name of an agency. It is durable and it carries an identity. The holder uses it across many transactions over many years, and the cost of losing it is higher, so these names are more likely to be kept.
The distinction matters for pricing, for dispute handling, and for the support you have to offer. A holder who lets a listing name go after a sale has lost little. An agent who loses a professional name printed on business cards, for-sale signs and years of referral emails has a real problem, and will bring it to you.
It also matters for collisions. Many properties share a street address across different cities, and many agents share a family name. Your naming rules need a convention for both cases before the first conflict, for instance that a listing name carries the city and that a professional name is granted to the first verified applicant with a documented way to tell namesakes apart.
## Trust between parties who meet once
A sale brings together a buyer, a seller, their agents, usually a lender, and the professionals who handle the closing and the transfer of title. Who those professionals are varies by country: lawyers, notaries, escrow or title companies, surveyors, inspectors. Most of them have never dealt with each other, and they have a short time in which to do so. In practice, a party confirms where a payment should go by a phone call or an email thread, and both are easy to imitate.
A name under a vetted namespace changes what is being checked. Instead of asking whether an account number received by email really belongs to the agency, the paying party looks up the agency's `name.yoursector` and sees the address it points to. The record sits on a public blockchain, and anyone can read it with a block explorer, a public website that displays what is recorded onchain. Both sides therefore look at the same record, and neither has to rely on a message sent by the other.
Be precise about what this check establishes. It shows that the name points to a given address and that the name was issued under your TLD. It says nothing by itself about who the holder is. That second half comes only from you: from the fact that your rules required the applicant to show a license, a business registration or an identity document before the name was issued. A namespace that issues names to anyone, with no check, gives a counterparty nothing to rely on.
This is why verification at issuance is the product and not an administrative detail. It costs staff time for every name, and it is the only reason a lender or a lawyer would treat a name under your TLD as meaning something. It also defines your exposure: if a name is misused, the first question you will be asked is what you checked before issuing it.
## Payments at closing and the many parties to be paid
A closing produces several payments at once: to the seller, to the seller's lender, to the agents on each side, to the professionals who handled the transfer, and to the tax authority where a transfer tax applies. Commercial transactions add parties and conditions. Sending money is not the hard part. The hard part is that the recipients and their shares have to be settled under time pressure by people who do not know each other.
Names help with one part of this. With a payment router such as [shaka](https://shaka.deal), a payment link can pay out to a name in place of a raw address, and the parties agree and sign the split onchain before any funds move; the router passes the funds on and does not hold them. In that arrangement, the names under `.yoursector` are the identifiers the split refers to, in a form a person can read.
The limits are real. In most countries the handling of the purchase price at closing is regulated and reserved to specific professionals, and the rules differ from one country to the next. A name does not displace any of them, and you should not suggest that it does. The realistic place for payments to a name is around the regulated core: a commission shared between a brokerage and its agent, a referral fee between two agencies, a contractor paid by a property manager, a deposit or a reservation fee where local rules allow it. The page on [payments to a name](/onchain-tld-payments) sets out what this capability covers.
For the holder, the practical gain is modest and concrete: the same identifier at every transaction, which a counterparty can check each time, instead of account details sent again and confirmed again.
## Local markets and the limits of a national namespace
Real estate is local to a degree few sectors match. An agent who is the reference for one neighborhood has little in common with a national network, and the people who need to check that agent's identity work in the same city.
This shapes the strategy for the namespace. A name means less if the namespace spans a whole country and the only parties who care about its holder are in one metropolitan area. A namespace run for one city or one region, by an operator who knows the participants, can offer a quality of verification that a national one cannot.
Verification itself is local. Licensing of agents, where it exists, is organized by country and often by state or province, each with its own register and its own conditions. An operator who checks licenses in one territory can do it well. An operator who promises to check them everywhere will end up checking them poorly, or paying for a process that the revenue from names does not cover.
So decide the geographic scope before launch. A narrow scope with strict verification and real support from the local profession will produce names that are kept. A broad scope with light rules will produce names that are registered once and forgotten. Since the TLD is a single sector word, the scope is set by your rules, not by the name: you can open one city first and write the rules so that others can be added without renaming anyone.
The other side of this is that a regional body with existing relationships starts well ahead. An association that already checks its members' license status and professional liability cover has the verification process in place. Issuing names is then an extension of work it already does, and the names can reflect membership that counterparties already recognize.
## The operator's role: rules, issuance, support and disputes
Running a market TLD is not the same as owning one. Once you issue names to third parties, you take on obligations that go well beyond keeping a token in a wallet.
**Rules.** You need published criteria: who qualifies, what documents are required, which names are reserved, and when a name can be withdrawn. Write them before the first name is issued, because changing them afterward creates disputes. Reserve your own name, generic terms that would mislead (words that suggest an official register or a public authority, for example), and the names of established firms in the territory that have not yet applied.
**Issuance.** On Freename, nobody but the holder of a TLD can issue names under it, so every name under your TLD exists because you issued it. That control is also a responsibility. A name issued to someone who uses it to pass for a licensed firm is your problem.
**Changes of affiliation.** This is the support question most specific to real estate. An agent leaves a brokerage: does the professional name follow the agent or stay with the firm? A brokerage merges or changes its trading name. An agent loses a license or lets it lapse. Your rules should say who holds each kind of name, what happens in each of these cases, and how often a holder's license is checked again after issuance.
**Support.** Holders will ask where their name works. Onchain names resolve outside the ICANN DNS root, so an ordinary browser does not open them unaided. An agent's or an agency's Freename name can be used in Bitcoin.com Wallet, in MetaMask by way of Freename's resolver, and on a desktop in any browser where the Freename Web3 extension has been installed. That coverage is partial and it changes. The page on [what is live](/whats-live) keeps track of it with sources. Most of your registrants will not be technical, so you need a plain explanation that does not overpromise.
**Disputes.** Two applicants claim the same name, or a third party claims that a name infringes its trademark. Both land with you. You need a written procedure, even a short one. The UDRP, the policy under which disputes over domain names in the ICANN system are decided, applies to registrars and registrants in that system and does not bind an onchain TLD. It remains a useful model of what a fair procedure looks like. A sound test for your own handling is how it would look to a court if the dispute went that far.
On that last point, do not assume. What an operator can do technically to a name once it is in the holder's wallet depends on the registry, and what you may do contractually depends on your terms and on the law that governs them. Confirm both before your rules promise withdrawal of a name, and have your own counsel review the text.
## Revenue from names: a worked example
Freename runs a royalty program under which the holder of a TLD is paid part of every registration fee for a name registered under it. Half is the most the registry advertises for that part, and what a real estate operator actually receives turns on the registry's terms in force and on activation conditions. The figures below are a worked example, not a forecast.
Assumptions, held from start to finish:
- Registration fee: USD 40 per name per year. This is a round figure chosen for the example, not a Freename price.
- Share paid to you: half of the fee, the advertised maximum, which gives USD 20 per name per year.
- Every name pays the fee once a year, and the share applies each year. Both points are assumptions to confirm with the registry.
- Three levels of names paying in a given year: 100 (a first cohort), 200 (the end of year one) and 500 (a target for year two).
- Verification: thirty minutes of staff time per application.
The table gives the yearly royalty at each level, at the advertised maximum and at a lower share of one quarter of the fee (USD 10 per name), in case the conditions for the maximum are not met.
| Names paying the fee | Royalty at half | Royalty at a quarter |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | USD 2,000 | USD 1,000 |
| 200 | USD 4,000 | USD 2,000 |
| 500 | USD 10,000 | USD 5,000 |
These figures leave out the price of the TLD and every operating cost. They also leave out what the royalty program itself costs: a Freename TLD has no annual renewal fee, but the registry sets a yearly charge for taking part in the program, to be subtracted from each row. If the TLD you acquire was registered under older terms that include the program for life, check with the registry before closing that a buyer keeps them.
Now the cost side. At thirty minutes per application, verifying 200 applicants takes 100 hours of staff time, against USD 4,000 of royalties. Add the questions from holders, the periodic check of licenses and the occasional dispute, and the margin at this volume is thin or negative.
The conclusion is plain: at these volumes, royalties do not pay back the price of a TLD and the cost of running it. The return has to come from elsewhere: a member service that an association wants to offer anyway, a verified identity layer for a network of agencies, or fewer payment errors across a managed portfolio. If you approach this as income from names, you need thousands of them. If you approach it as infrastructure for a community you already serve, the royalty is a contribution to costs and the benefit is operational.
You can run your own fee, share and volumes through the [Subname Revenue Calculator](/subname-revenue-calculator).
## What to check before acquiring the TLD
Work through five questions before you mandate anyone to approach a holder, or before you answer a note about a TLD that matches your sector.
**Does the word match the community you will serve?** A sector TLD earns trust because it corresponds to a recognized professional category. In real estate, test the word against how local professionals describe themselves: the usual term for an agent, a broker or a property manager differs between countries, and a word that reads naturally in one market can sound foreign in the next.
**Are there trademark conflicts?** A sector word can also be someone's registered trademark in your territory, and trademark rules vary by country. The [Trademark Name Check](/trademark-tlds#check) is a free starting point. Your own counsel decides.
**How will you hold it?** On Freename, a TLD is a token recorded onchain and kept in a wallet. Whoever controls that wallet controls issuance for every professional who relies on the namespace. A multisignature wallet, which needs the approval of several keys before it acts, is worth considering for any operator running a namespace commercially.
**Who are the first hundred registrants?** List them by firm, by category and by city before you acquire. If you cannot, the namespace is probably too thin to sustain in the territory you have in mind.
**What is the TLD worth to you?** Given the worked example above, the answer rests on the operational case, not on royalties. The page on [how a TLD valuation is built](/valuation) explains the elements that enter a price.
## A realistic first year
The first year is mostly setup and patient outreach, with little revenue. Planning for that avoids the discouragement of slow early growth.
First-year plan for a real estate sector TLD
Months 1 to 2: secure the TLDOnce the transfer has closed, place the TLD in a wallet with documented controls and a recovery procedure. Confirm the activation conditions of the royalty program with the registry.
Months 2 to 3: write the rulesDraft eligibility, reserved names, naming conventions for listings and professionals, changes of affiliation, abuse reporting and disputes. Have counsel review them and publish them before issuing anything.
Months 3 to 4: issue to a first cohortChoose registrants you can verify yourself, such as the agents of one brokerage or the members of one local association, up to the first hundred of the worked example. Help each of them set up the name.
Months 4 to 6: settle the support materialTest the names in Bitcoin.com Wallet, in MetaMask with Freename's resolver and with the browser extension. Write a one-page guide for non-technical holders that states plainly where a name works and where it does not.
Months 6 to 9: widen within the territoryPresent the namespace to a second brokerage group, a developer or a property manager in the same city. Watch whether the first cohort uses its names in real transactions.
Months 9 to 12: review against the exampleCompare the names issued with your assumptions. Note which categories of holders registered and which did not, and adjust price, scope or verification before planning year two.
Two signals in that year tell you more than the count of names. The first is use: whether a name appears on an agency's payment instructions or in a property manager's contractor file. The second is checking: whether anyone outside the first cohort has looked a name up before paying. A namespace with fewer names that are used and checked is in better shape than a larger one that nobody consults.
## Where to start if the answers are favorable
If the questions above come out in favor of an acquisition, three pages of this site take the next step with you. The page [for operators](/operators) addresses organizations that intend to run a market TLD as a namespace. If the TLD you have in mind is held by someone else, [buy-side acquisition](/buy-side-acquisition) explains how an organization mandates Hush Partners to find its holder and make the approach. After a transfer, [post-transfer activation](/post-transfer-activation) covers putting the TLD to work, and the [Launch Roadmap](/activation-roadmap) tool builds a plan for the launch.
On fees, the rule is simple. An organization that mandates the desk pays a fixed amount, never a share of the price, and nobody else is charged: a holder who answers a note pays nothing, and a party that buys a TLD offered through the desk pays the price of the TLD and no fee. A standard mutual NDA covers every exchange, and closing runs through onchain escrow on an aftermarket.
If you are not there yet, the useful next step costs nothing: write the list of your first hundred registrants and the one-page draft of your issuance rules. Those two documents will tell you more about this sector's demand in your territory than any model.
## Questions people ask
### Can an operator withdraw a name after it has been issued?
Only if both the registry and your own terms allow it. Whether it is technically possible is a question for the registry, and whether it is permitted against a paying holder depends on your terms and on the law that applies to them. Have counsel draft those provisions before the first name is issued, not after the first dispute.
### What happens to a listing name when the property sells?
Nothing happens by itself: this is a matter for your rules and for the registry's terms on how long a name lasts. Your rules should say whether listing names are limited in time, whether they pass to a new agency when the mandate changes hands, and whether a holder may keep one after the sale. Leaving it open produces a steady flow of support requests.
### Do agents need technical knowledge to hold a name?
Not much. The holder needs a wallet that can receive the name, and the ability to point the name to an address or a website. A short guided setup can cover both. The harder part is explaining to a non-technical professional why the name does not open in an ordinary browser without an extension, which is why that explanation should be ready before the first name is issued.
### Should a brokerage hold the names of its agents?
It can, and some firms will prefer it, but it removes the main attraction for the agent, which is an identity that survives a change of firm. A workable rule is that the firm's name is held by the firm and each professional name by the professional, with the affiliation recorded by you and updated when it changes.