NAREIT Designated to Run .REIT

Real estate investment trusts or REITs may soon sport a new web address. Beginning in the fall of 2015, REITs will be able to submit applications to register domains that identify their brand and end in .REIT rather than the more traditional .com.

The National Association for Real Estate Investment Trusts® (NAREIT), a worldwide voice for REITs, traded and non-traded, will operate .REIT which is known as a top-level domain (TLD). NAREIT will serve as registry for the TLD approving or denying requests to use the new ending.

In 2011 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization dedicated to keeping the internet safe, announced a new program designed to allow other TLDs beyond .com, .org, and .biz, among others. NAREIT, seizing the opportunity, submitted what it calls a “community-based application” on behalf of the worldwide REIT community to operate .REIT.

NAREIT says its goal is to educate the global public about REITs and provide them protection ensuring that only genuine REITs are able to use a domain name ending with .REIT.

Worldwide real estate organizations including the British Property Federation, the Property Council of Australia, and the Real Property Association of Canada, among others, voiced their support of NAREIT’s initiative.

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