Profiled at Domain Name Wire.

Thank you Andrew, that was cool. Now I shall return to the shadows....

"A profile of a virtual (and real world) real estate investor.

In an industry of self-promoters, Stuart Wood maintains a low profile.
“I prefer not to toot my own horn,” he claims. You may not have heard of him, nor his hometown of Racine, Wisconsin. But Wood is a big player in the domain name space.

Wood’s Salient Properties specializes in investing in both virtual real estate and physical real estate. He is perhaps best known for purchasing Wifi.com for $225,000 last year. Wood developed it into a directory of wifi hotspots. It’s now time for Wood to flip the site; but more on that later.

Salient Properties recently launched BuildsOut.com, a service that provides custom web sites on domains. This creates an opportunity for domain owners to get repeat and search engine traffic to their sites.

A number of domains qualify for BuildsOut. “Obviously we would love to have all high traffic premium .coms,” says Wood. “Inreality, BuildsOut.com has packaged programs for virtually any domain. We will develop any domain in which the domain name owner is passionate about.”
Long term, Wood hopes to manage 500-1000 domains in the BuildsOut program.

Wood came up with the idea for BuildsOut when he was developing Wifi.com. “The web developer I hired for the [wifi.com] job became my wife shortly thereafter and we work very well together as a team,” he says. Talk about a great working relationship.

“I also sat on a panel at the Domain Roundtable in August (my coming out from the shadows event) and based upon sharing my own experiences developing a domain I was amazed to find people approaching me about how to develop some of their own domains,” says Wood. “Obviously, as domainers we know development has really started to heat up over the past six months and there are only a few of us domainers who understand the industry and have the capacity to develop.”

That brings us back full circle to Wifi.com. BuildsOut is a big endeavor and taking all of Wood’s time. “We are a small development team and have to be selective in our focus,” says Wood. He has engaged a broker to sell the domain to the “logical buyer market.”

Good luck, Stuart. And welcome out of hiding."