Place.com Acquired for $3 Million

On Wednesday, GeekWire reported on the $100 million funding round of a real estate startup called Place. The company is now valued at $1 Billion, and it wisely uses Place.com for its website. Most interestingly to domain investors, the article shared that Place.com was acquired for $3 million. Jeff Eckhaus spotted the sale price and shared it on Twitter:

Buried in article – The company spent $3 million to acquire the https://t.co/NtanMv2sYp domain name

Real estate startup Place comes out of nowhere with $100M round, led by Goldman at $1B valuation https://t.co/sNcDltiK2n via @GeekWire

— eckhaus (@eckhaus) November 19, 2021

Here’s an excerpt from the article discussing the purchase price for the Place.com domain name:

“The company spent $3 million to acquire the Place.com domain name, Kinney said, describing it as an important step in Place’s ambitions to build a consumer brand in support of the agents that use its technology and services.”

I did a Whois search for the domain name at DomainTools to learn more about its history. Current Whois records show the registrant of Place.com is Escrow.com. That leads me to believe the domain name was purchased with some sort of payment plan.

Historic Whois records at DomainTools show that Escrow.com became the registrant either in late December 2020 or January 2021. Prior to that, the registrant was listed as GoDaddy’s Domain Buy Service. NameBio shows that Place.com sold for $550,000 in May of 2017.

Because Place.com is currently registered to an escrow service, it is unlikely that DNJournal or NameBio will chart this $3 million sale at this point. I would imagine the sale will be charted once the Whois changes to reflect the real estate company as the registrant.

If the $3 million sale does get confirmed for 2021, it would rank as the 4th largest publicly reported domain name sale. It would trail the $3 million plus sales Hippo.com, Christmas.com, and Floor.com.