Last night around 4:30 pm I was at looking at some recent listings of domains for sale when I saw this domain news snippet:

The final stage of the .es tld liberalisation has been reached. On November 8, 2005, the Spanish domain name registry fully opened the doors to Spanish registrations, eliminating the strict registration requirements. Registrations are now available on a first come first served bases.

The time schedule for registering .es domains is as follows:

November 8, 2005, 7 am CET, domains names starting in numbers, or the letters “a” and “b” may be registered.
The letters “c” to “e” will be added November 9th, 7am CET
The letters “f” to “n” from November 10th, 7am CET
Open registration starts November 11th, 7am
In the past, due to restrictions those whom did not operate out of Spain were not able to register the .es version of their domain. Consequently the Spanish domain has been slow to grow compared to other European domains and many good domains are still free. The liberalisation is expected to expedite the growth.

It’s now 3:30 am, my credit card is a few grand lighter and I feel pretty damn lucky. Here’s how it all went down:

First I went to nic.es.

It’s in Spanish, so if you get stuck there’s always Google language tools for translation.

Anytime you want to register a TLD with a any kind of foreign extension, you can usually go to nic.(whatever) to see what is available. Now, you don’t want to purchase anything at these registrars because they are traditionally the most expensive place to shop. However, they have the fastest and most reliable access to the databases of available domains for that TLD. Moreover, sometimes a domain will be reserved but not yet purchased, so you have the opportunity to hop on the waiting list and see how many folks are ahead of you.

For example, there are 18 people ahead of me for the domain name:

hous.es

So if all 18 of them forget to buy this domain, I’ll be able to pick it up for around $30 euros (as I can’t go through a less expensive registrar b/c of the waiting list) and sell it in the next month for $10k or more to some Real Estate Broker or Home Builder.

For the last 9 hours I felt like I’ve been cheating! On one of my monitors I have this crossword puzzle tool open typing in:
a – - e s
b – - e s
and so on for all the 5 (3+2), and 6(4+2) letter words that end in es. Meanwhile I have my brother on the phone rattling off every word he can think of that would be worth money. I have nic.es open for fast checking of domain avail and wait lists, and eurodns open for cheap registration of the domains that are available.

YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW MUCH GOOD STUFF WAS AVAILABLE!

I’m still thinking I should get back in there and snag the rest of the marginal stuff that’s 3 and 4 characters + .es (like pill.es, rang.es, axl.es and teas.es)- and I didn’t even begin to think about brandable names that were not in the dictionary. I’m just too exhausted to go through all the 7(5+.es) domains yet- but I picked up a few monsters along the way especially when my brother mentioned some sports teams.

I know many of you might be caught up on the “dot com is the only domain to buy” kick. But TLDs that make words are now heating up in the market thanks to services like del.icio.us, blo.gs and tons more.

The math is simple:

less than 1000 5 letter words that end in es
less than 2000 6 letter words that end in es

6,500,000,000 people on the planet. Growing daily.

about 750,000,000 have access to the Internet today. Growing Daily.

1 in 5 people on Earth can speak English.

There is a very limited supply of short, desirable domain names that make English words. There is an ever growing demand for these domain names.

These short domain names that spell words are like beach front property – there’s only so much of it in the world and everyone is going to want to live there.