Facing The Absurd

Unbelievable, I did my first real estate deal today. I have generally always avoided this asset class as the ROI didn’t meet my criteria – buying a house at a 5% rental yield is and was a waste of money for me. That’s why I never bothered even to buy my own apartment to live in since renting made sense to me. But I finally found a way how to improve ROI significantly with blending in some development as well.

I bought an unused attic in an apartment building today, where me and my building partners will develop two pretty exclusive apartments with roof top terraces. I acquired two garages in the building as part of the deal as well. I paid around $260k to acquire the property. Redevelopment will take about 9 months and will cost around another $320k. So total cost around $580k. Then I plan roughly another 6-12 months for the apartments to sell for around $1.3 million. This kind of ROI suddenly makes sense to me, so I might do some more of this stuff in thefuture…

I harvest domains predominantly for their PPC revenue. Recently I’ve noticed an interesting thing with the CCTLD portfolios I create by new registrations – suddenly sales are bringing in a “noticeable” part of the portfolio’s revenue. When it comes to the cctld portfolios, this sales element is about 15% of the revenue (the remaining 85% coming from PPC). With my .com portfolios this is probably only about 3%. Interesting, can’t really find a reason to why.

Otherwise when it comes to ccltds I’ve been much more active with them recently. Since I’ve sort of overharvested the .com universe and ROI has been worsening there, I’ve been looking for other TLDs where ROI is better. So last year I did a lot in .nl, .se., .de, .co.uk, .it, .be, .com.mx, .ca, .com.br, .pl etc. Recently I’ve gone so exotic as to play around with .jp or .co.nz. Now I have around 50k CCTLDs but I think I’ve depleted them quite a bit as well