Another URL purchase reshapes Australia’s property market

Originally published in the Australian Financial Review Jul 6, 2025

The Australian property listings market was already on the verge of a huge competitive shake-up with US real estate giant CoStar spending billions of dollars to buy Domain and millions more to grab the homes.com.au URL.

Now, there’s a new player in the (off-the-plan) part of town.

A listings company that caters solely to new builds has spent big to buy the domain name Apartments.com.au in a bid to take on $31 billion market leader REA Group as the biggest place to buy off-the-plan units.

It was one of the top-10 URL transactions in Australian history, according to its broker, though the price is not clear.

Third Door Ventures runs Urban.com.au, which tracks and lists new developments in Australia. Last month, it acquired the Apartments.com.au URL in a cash-and-equity deal from Darren Pateman, the former managing director of West Australian developer Finbar Group, who had held on to it for more than two decades.

“We’re extremely focused on getting a lot bigger than we are now,” said Mike Bird, who co-founded Urban.com.au and is its chief executive. “Off the plan is about 10 per cent of [REA’s] business. And from our point of view, it represents 10 per cent of their focus.”

Urban.com.au was created in 2017 by Bird and George Glover, who turned to real estate after building the marketing agency Social Garden five years earlier. They acquired home builder comparison website Homeshelf last year and rival listings platform iBuildNew earlier this year.

Carsales co-founder Steve Kloss, Fliteboard creator David Trewern and former REA chief operating officer Arthur Charlaftis are all investors in the business.

Its latest acquisition is about growing the listings business, but also about reducing the cost of finding new customers.

“The cost of us to get someone to remember Urban.com.au as an apartments platform, we’d have to tell them two or three or four times,” Bird said. “We had people using our platform and then not remembering our names, which was a problem for us. With Apartments.com.au, we only need to tell them once.”

He admitted it was a relatively niche player, with 2.5 million website visits a year compared with realestate.com.au’s 12 million a month. But Bird believes there is an opportunity for smaller players as the titans battle.

“The reason we work in this market is not because we think it’s a great market that’s working super efficiently,” he said.

“The difference between us and the established players is that most people need to be convinced to buy off the plan. People come to us and have already decided that that’s what they’re going to do.”

The big URL buy was brokered by Ed Keay-Smith, senior domain broker at DBR Digital Assets.

“Apartments.com.au is without question a top-10 domain sale in Australia,” he said. “It belongs in the same tier as Bitcoin.com.au and Money.com.au.”

Australian cryptocurrency exchange Independent Reserve bought Bitcoin.com.au for $3 million in 2023.

CoStar is buying Domain, pending a shareholder vote, and plans to invest heavily to make it more competitive with the much larger REA. It paid $22.8 million for the homes.com.au URL (it already owns homes.com) and plans to reinstall ex-Domain chief executive Jason Pellegrino as its Australian president.

CoStar already owns 17 per cent of Domain but will buy more than 60 per cent more from Nine Entertainment, which publishes The Australian Financial Review.

What makes Third Door Ventures’ purchase even more noteworthy is that CoStar also owns apartments.com, an apartment rental website in the US. Bird said he had no plan to sell the URL again and had been planning to buy it before CoStar entered the Australian market.

REA, which is being investigated by the competition regulator for alleged price gouging, last week cut staff from its technology team and outsourced other roles to India as it prepares for its new main rival.

E&P analyst Entcho Raykovski told clients Domain had also been cutting costs, and despite CoStar’s talk of increased investment, this could “open the door for REA to pull further away while Domain manages the transition to CoStar ownership”.