As I mentioned, I am in the process of prepping our SF house for sale. Lots of realtors advertise with a website that is the street address of the home. Out of pure curiosity, I went my home’s URL… and discovered the domain had already been claimed and parked by one of the realtors I interviewed. NOT the one that got the business, by the way.
A colleague who referred this realtor says they do it as a matter of practice, in order to set up a great presentation. Apparently they were going to set up a website for me and surprise me with it, but I made my decision before they could do this. She says as a marketer she admires their moxie and intent.
I disagree. First of all, there is no need to have a live URL to develop a website. Millions of websites are under development right now using local files on the developer’s desktop which will eventually be ported online. At any rate, the URL was parked, not active. The only thing this accomplishes is to keep another realtor, or me, from getting rights to the domain. (This realtor later said they’d relinquish the domain name at no charge.)
We know that in the early days of the internet there were entrepreneurial cybersquatters who grabbed domain names of recognizable brands such as Panasonic, Hertz and Avon, in hopes of reselling them for a fortune. The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 put an end to this practice. But how is grabbing somebody’s meatspace address any different?
I think by rights the domain name that corresponds to a street address belongs to the entity that owns the physical location. Am I all wet here?