new gTLD Vacation.Rentals sold for $500,300 (domain name only)

MetBob said:

I did a Google search to see how common vacation sites using extension rentals was, and I was surprised that there were many thousands of sites that use the extension for some sort of vacation use (clearly some duplicates). I even found one right here from my mid sized Canadian city. TLD rentals has more real world use than I had imagined.

Google: "vacation site:.rentals" (without the quotation signs)

I think the importance of the sale is that it will help spread the word of new extensions, and indirectly help acceptance of them by the general public (and ultimately improve prospects for ngTLD sales, although it is still a tough sell for most of us).

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Rich said:

site:*.rentals may give a clearer picture, looks like 70k+ websites.
Congrats to buyer and seller, still a long road ahead.

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Michael Kugler said:

Hello to all,

I am Mike Kugler, the owner of the domain for this thread.

I appreciate all points of view here (good and bad) and knew most of them way before I bought the URL.

I am jumping in here to put a hammer down to one point in particular that is ridiculous. The amount of the sale and the need for "proof"

In a completely unrelated website, someone made me aware that there was debate if the sale was even authentic. Honest to God, someone had the temerity to publicly lay doubt to this purchase, which led me here.

While some may see no harm in slamming the integrity of Donuts or VacaRent, LLC - I do. Little innuendos of "titter titter, tsk tsk, disclose the "truth", come clean and all of this nonsense have much bigger implications. What if my business partners were made aware of this post and began to question my integrity?

"Did you actually purchase the domain for the amount you said?"
"Does Mr. Gasbag know something we don't?"
"How do we actually know you spent the money you said you did?"
"Seems to be a lot of gossip going around...."

So to put it to rest once and for all, here is a ACTUAL image of the LAST wire transfer made for the final payment from us to Donuts. (Accts and routing numbers are redacted for obvious reasons.) You will see the amount of $375,300 at the top. The company Alpu, LLC is owned by my wife and myself. It was formed and federally trademarked back in 2015 and still active today. Alpu, LLC then transferred ownership to VacaRent, LLC which was newly formed with my current investor/partners in 2018.

Please do not feed into libelous and slanderous discussions without giving the affected parties an opportunity to "come clean, tell the truth, give full disclosure, account for our sins"

With that, I hope everyone has a great day.

With respect, Mike Kugler
CEO/President
VacaRent, LLC

(Current placeholder for #10 on Google for Vacation Rentals) :D

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When someone says to me dot com dot net dot us my immediate question back is “What is a dot com?” When I tell the search engines we are a dot rentals – they know exactly what the site is and the niche area they need to put our site in – much like a Barnes and Noble directory tags showing a section for Travel or Music or Cooking. The old Barnes and Noble used to be fiction/non-fiction (.com – .net) Times are changing in my opinion.

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In the end, we are thrilled to have made the purchase – I have been chasing this domain for 2.5 years through a monitoring service and it took me (literally) 5 seconds to settle the deal and make the offer. (Yes, the $300 was on purpose – I wanted to knock Blake Janover off of the top spot with home.loans :D)...

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