Job.at sold for €408,000 this week, the highest value of any .at domain name sold date, and second highest value of any domain name sold in a German-speaking country. The highest known sale prior to this was Mozart.at for €70,000 in the .AT to ccTLD and US$695,000 for poker.com, bought by a German company. There have been other unreported .AT sales, but it is not believed any of these were above €200,000.

Job.at was previously owned by Immobilien.net, who has the largest online listing of real estate properties in Austria, and was the first such company in Europe. The company was founded by Markus Ertler and his brother, and they registered job.at within months of the Austrian registry commencing operations in early 1997. As well as real estate, they also have online dating websites kontakt.at and partner.at. However real estate is around 70 per cent of their business, employing 55 staff in their offices in central Vienna.

“We are extremely pleased with the sale of job.at,” said Immobilien.net co-founder Markus Ertler. “We never intended to sell job.at, but rather to develop a business around the domain name. Unfortunately with our other interests, we never had the time to fully develop the site, and the offer from Visions4Tomorrow came at the right time with what we thought was the right price.” It is interesting to note that Visions4Tomorrow currently have no online or offline employment service.

Every year Immobilien.net was receiving five to seven enquiries asking them to sell the domain name, and the price being offered kept consistently rising. Herr Ertler and his brother came to the conclusion that the time was right for them to sell the domain name.

Herr Ertler also knows that holding on to the domain name for another year, two years or more would have seen a significant increase in the value of the domain name, but real estate, or “immobilien” in German, is their specialty and the money will be much better invested in their online real estate listings.

Herr Ertler also believes talking about the sale of job.at will bring to a wider audience that domain names are increasing in value, something that people can invest in and that they need to consider as an integral part of their business.

Immobilien.net own around 1,000 domain names, around 50 per cent of these are .AT names, the rest are .DE, in eastern European ccTLDs or spread among the main gTLDs. And most are related to real estate.

Immobilien.net have developed multilingual software that can automatically translate real estate listings from eastern European languages such as Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian and are using this software to expand into eastern European countries in the near future. By using the domain names they have registered in each ccTLD combined with their multilingual software, Immobilien.net believes they will offer a service that is currently not available.