Mogul, the real estate investing platform that spent its early years at Mogul.club, has moved to Mogul.com after acquiring the domain for $1.3 million.
Co-founder and CEO Alex Blackwood announced the purchase on LinkedIn, describing it as the company buying “the best real estate on the web.”
Real estate is all about location, and today we’re thrilled to announce we bought the best real estate on the web. - Alex Blackwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Mogul
Mogul had wanted the .com from the beginning. According to Blackwood, the question was less about whether the company should own it and more about when the price and stage of the business would justify the purchase.
Recent growth changed that calculation. Mogul grew 14.5x last year and expects to grow another 5 to 6x this year. The platform has passed 150 properties, most offerings sell out in under 24 hours, and the company is now cash flow positive.
Why Mogul Chose to Buy Now
A key reason Mogul bought the domain now was the risk of paying much more for it later.
As the company grows, Mogul.com becomes more important to the business while its value to the current owner may also increase. Blackwood argued that paying $1.3 million now could therefore be cheaper than returning to the negotiation after another year of growth.
That is going to pay off dividends. We know the minute that we announce a bunch of different things that it’s going to go up in price. - Alex Blackwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Mogul, in an interview for Inc.
Blackwood also put a number on what success would look like. For Mogul.com to pay for itself within the first year, the domain would need to contribute an additional $1.3 million in revenue through the platform.
The alternative was keeping the money in a high-yield savings account. Instead, Mogul chose to put it into an asset it could potentially sell again if necessary.
Worst case, we own a domain. Best case, we own THE word in real estate. - Alex Blackwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Mogul
That view is particularly relevant to Mogul. The company makes the case for investing in property as an asset, and it approached its domain purchase in much the same way: consider the acquisition price, what the asset can contribute and what it may be worth later.
An Unexpected Hiring Boost
The acquisition also had an unexpected impact on recruiting.
Blackwood said job applications increased after the announcement. Mogul has nine roles to fill this quarter, and outreach to potential candidates started getting faster responses.
New hires also told the team that moving to Mogul.com made the company feel more established and more serious about the brand it was building.
Validation amplifies everything. Every post, every recruiting DM, every investor call hits different when it comes from Mogul.com. - Alex Blackwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Mogul
Outgrowing Mogul.club
A .club domain is a top-level domain commonly associated with clubs and membership-based organizations. It can be an alternative when the matching .com is unavailable or out of budget, but it also comes with limitations.
Compared with .com, .club is less familiar to the broader public and does not carry the same level of universal recognition. That can create issues around recall, direct traffic, email leakage and user confusion, particularly as a company grows and invests more heavily in marketing.
A more narrowly defined extension can also become restrictive as the business expands. What works at one stage may become less suitable once the brand starts moving into additional products, services or categories.
Mogul has now reached that point. Blackwood told Inc. that Mogul plans to expand “up and down the supply chain of real estate,” which made the limitations of Mogul.club increasingly apparent.
We always think about how we’re not going to just be a fractional investing platform. Ultimately, we want to basically go up and down the supply chain of real estate, and so you can’t do that with Mogul.club. - Alex Blackwood, Co-Founder and CEO of Mogul, in an interview for Inc.
Building on the Name You Want to Own
After announcing the acquisition, Blackwood said he received a flood of messages asking whether spending $1.3 million on Mogul.com was simply a PR stunt.
His answer was much simpler:
Just a company that knows what it wants to be called.
Mogul.com is more intuitive for users and broad enough to support the business as it adds products and expands beyond its current offering.
Blackwood says the goal is to build the world’s largest real estate platform. In that context, the move to Mogul.com is less about changing an extension and more about giving the company a domain that can carry a much larger business.