REDC acquired the ultra premium domain name Auction.com in 2009 for $1.7 Million and it really helped the real estate company from its past brand and web address USHomeAuction.com!
Fast forward now several years and according to several articles, the business name Auction.com has became limiting to them and it was time for a change via a rebranding.
The company Auction.com is now: Ten-X
On the surface, going from Auction.com to Ten-X doesn’t seem to be any kind of improvement IMO. Ten X’s worse really!
Auction.com tells me instantly what you offer. RealEstateAuction.com would really tell me by looking at your domain as to what you offer, but that is being picky and Auction.com as a brand is much stronger!
When one considers that the company behind Auction.com did a flip and went from selling 100% distressed real estate sales via auction to 60% distressed and 40% traditional sales in 2015, it can show how “auction” wasn’t relevant any longer. If 40% of your sales are not done by auction, then the name is limiting. The company also sees this trend continuing.
Grab Taxi had this “name limiting” problem recently as well and they rebranded simply to Grab since they offer more than just a “taxi” service which I talked about here.
Although the company has went from REDC to Auction.com to Ten-X, the Auction.com brand isn’t going away as many rebrands result in and this is very wise.
Ten-X is now 3 divisions:
- Ten-X Commercial
- Ten-X Homes
- Auction.com
Domain wise, the company did a pretty good job securing domain names to the new brand name for its online properties. I never like hyphened domains / names as it creates a bit of confusion. Do I include the hyphen or not when I type the domain? I also think the hyphen makes the name look less professional. (just my opinion) Ten-X uses the hyphened version as its main domain name: Ten-X.com
The company has also purchased the domain name TenX.com without the hyphen, which was owned by TenX Precision LLC of Austin Texas. That transaction appears to have taken place about July 29, 2015 based on whois history records. TenX.com does a redirect to Ten-X.com for any that visit it, yet still land where the company would like them to.
Long tail versions were also registered, like TenXRealEstate.com. That domain name was registered on July 24, 2015, likely after securing Tenx.com. Ten-X.com also had to be acquired from its past owner as that domain name had been registered since 1998. Ten-X.com appears to have been acquired around October 9, 2015 time frame, so after TenX.com.
TenXCommercial.com was also registered by the company, but it appears that several domains like TenXHomes.com is not owned by the company, nor Ten-XHomes.com and Ten-XCommercial for an example but they are all registered.
Rick Sharga of Ten-X gave a pretty interesting quote in the 2nd linked article above via NREIOnline.com:
We went through over 500 different names when we decided it was time to rebrand ourselves. What appealed to us about Ten-X, other than it is pretty easy to remember and unique in our industry, is it is sort of aspirational. We believe it connotes the idea that we can make things exponentially better for people who buy and sell real estate—that what we’ll do is 10 times better than anything they have done before when it comes to buying and selling commercial assets.
500 names is a lot and I can promise you that the domain names played a big factor into the name choice! Even though they were “already owned by somebody” a price can often change that and did. What that price was, we will likely never know, but it was in the budget and worked for both parties several times in this case.
A lot of aftermarket domain name sales result from rebrands. Marketing, “domain upgrade/improvement” and main brands are also top domain aftermarket sales. The majority of them go unreported.
I don’t think this is a bad decision. Their service has changed. I think they should have contacted Larry Fisher for the brand Home.com instead.
They also own TenX.com as well as Ten-X.com which may be more about esthetics when using the dash. Ten X is has an interesting sound to it and is brand-able. They are going to be spending a lot to market that name instead of saving on direct navigation like Home.com. That’s the gift that keeps on giving.
@Michael,
Since they deal with a lot of commercial real estate, “Home” would seem limiting as well? Even though a business may consider a new property “home”, I think in general, most people would think of “home” as a house.