18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

Mission and purpose

The real estate business is a large but fragmented industry. There is currently a profusion of multiple listing services sites on the Internet, using various domains with varying gTLDs, second-level designations and sometimes even third-level domains. An Internet user wishing to search for a particular property or type of property sometimes has to engage in a rather involved and convoluted web search.

.MLS proposes to create an Internet space which will become the easily recognizable gathering place for property sellers and real estate agents to create trusted and easily accessible online property listings, and ease of access for people searching for specific properties or types of properties, independent of location or current MLS database listing. Over 4,200,000 homes sold in 2011 in the U.S. alone (http:⁄⁄www.realtor.org⁄research⁄research⁄ehsdata). But current MLS listings are limited and fragmented. Wikipedia states that “There is no single authoritative MLS, and no universal data format. However, in real estate there is a data standard—the Real Estate Transaction Standard—which is being deployed among many MLS’s in North America. The many local and private databases, using XML data feeds to input and output agents listings—some of which are controlled by single associations of realtors or groupings of associations (which represent all brokers within a given community or area) or by real estate brokers—are collectively referred to as the MLS because of their data sharing or reciprocal access agreements” (http:⁄⁄en.wikipedia.org⁄wiki⁄Multiple_listing_service). Property listings on .MLS, each listed under a separate domain, would expand accessibility, thus potentially dramatically increasing the velocity of the real estate market.

Internet users will come to know that all types of properties are easily discoverable under a .MLS domain, and property listers will be incentivized to create more, better, and more standardized property listings, knowing that they will have an expanded and more targeted audience. Over time, as the .MLS TLD is increasingly adopted and content accrues, search engines will modify their algorithms to specifically target .MLS listings, making the TLD even more accessible and useful. Driven by this dynamic, we anticipate that we will have 50,100 domains under management (DUMs) after three years.

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