If you're a member of NAR, you will soon have the option of grabbing a free .realtor website domain from the organization. These new addresses should be available to members by the end of September.

Back in 2012, the trade group applied to ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) to create and manage the .realtor top level domain. Now NAR has officially signed the contract that will enable them to launch signups for the new domains. They expect to be able to start offering their members access to these new domains by the end of the current quarter, which ends September 30th.

NAR is offering an introductory deal for its members--a free .realtor domain for one year to the first 500,000 people who register. NAR's Canadian counterpart CREA will be offering 10,000 free .realtor domains to their members, as well. Single year registration will regularly cost $39.95 with discounts for registering for multiple years.

GTLD Domains Are New Territory

These new domains will definitely be of interest to agents looking to brand themselves in the online world as a Realtor. It will do a pretty good job of telling your prospective clients what you do just from reading your URL, though it will take some time. Generic Top Level Domains are a new concept for the public, so to a certain point it will take a bit of getting used to for the average user. In time they'll understand that all these URLs, like .coffee, .technology, .email or .photography will work just the same as the tried and true .com, .ca and .net, but there will be an adjustment period of these domains become more common.

The first wave of these domains launched last year and many have had negligible amounts of registrations, so it'll be interesting to see if this new domain does take off.

SEO Considerations for .realtor

One point of consideration for these new domains is whether they will bring an added SEO boost to a website. Google search guru Matt Cutts had this to say about the topic:

Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either.

So if you're thinking getting a .realtor domain will automatically put you ahead of competitors, that's not the case. Your site will still be ranked, but it won't be getting a leg up by virtue of having a .realtor domain.

At the end of the day, it always comes back to the quality of the content on your site and what value you're offering to your customers through your web presence.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.