As the last meadows and vacant lots disappear from inland boomtowns, some of the businesses sprouting up there find themselves jostling for space even on the virtual landscape of the Internet.

Temecula's economic growth has increased the value of locally focused domain names that have long been registered and used, such as temeculavalleyhomes.com and temeculainformation.com. Development in surrounding communities has created a more recent market for Web addresses that incorporate names such as Menifee and Murrieta.

It all makes for a field of domain names that's increasingly crowded, with real estate agents, informational businesses and other companies coming up with increasingly varied spellings of local place names. While temecularealestate.com has been in use for a decade, temvlyhomes.com was first registered in 2003.

"It's very difficult to find a good dot-com name right now," said Dan Jauregui, a Ramona-based agent who sells real estate locally through lakeelsinoreland.com and menifeerealestate.com. "They're pricey."

That's because each Web address -- also known as a universal resource link -- is unique in the world. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private nonprofit organization based in Marina Del Rey, controls the domain names, including the extensions -- .com, .org, .net and so forth.

The organization works in cooperation with the U.S. Commerce Department and several hundred Internet companies, such as Network Solutions and Go Daddy Software.

A person or an organization can obtain a domain name by paying $5 to $15 a year to one of those registrars, and generally keeps it as long as the fees stay current. When a domain name is already taken, a business owner can contact the registrant and offer to buy out the registration.

Business address

Caroline Collins said a real estate agent once offered her $100,000 for the rights to her domain name, temecularealestate.com, which she first registered and built a site around in the mid-1990s. Collins turned down the offer; her business had come to depend on the site, she said.

Real estate is hardly the only industry where businesses can jostle for URLs, though its uniquely local markets mean that communities' names are prized components of the domain names.

Seven years after a consulting company bought the domain name business.com for a reported $7.5 million, real estate agents and other entrepreneurs are well aware that a locally focused domain name can be a valuable leg up in a fast-growing community, even if they don't always have to pay an arm and a leg for it.

"If people are searching to move to Temecula, wherever they are across the country, they'll type 'temecularealestate.com' and then they'll e-mail me," Collins said.

It's nearly impossible to determine how many people find the site in this way. Their numbers are probably not as great as they were five and 10 years ago, thanks to the increasing precision and popularity of Google and other Internet search engines.

But Collins said discussions with several of her clients suggest the descriptive name gave her a lot of momentum in the first few years. Even now, potential customers who glimpse a URL on a billboard or the side of a car -- or hear it on the radio -- are much more likely to remember it if it's descriptive and uses the common spellings of words and names, marketing experts say.

More than 140 people visited Collins' site for the first time last month, according to a software program she uses to track visitors through the site. Numbers like that have translated into dozens of clients over the years, she said.

Collins launched a sister Web site, murrietarealestate.com, in 2000. It gets fewer visitors than the Temecula site. A couple of years ago, another real estate agent offered to buy it. After she suggested $25,000, she didn't hear back from the other agent, she said.

A rose, by any other name?

Collins' experience is common, said Judy Zulfiqar, a Temecula-based consultant who advises clients on Internet strategies. Though Zulfiqar said she regularly hears of local businesses making and receiving offers of $300 to $15,000 for their domain names, they often are unable to agree on a price. The would-be buyer usually ends up registering a less desirable name, she said.

"Registering the domain name is the tricky battle of finding a name that relates to your business without being too long to understand," or being taken already by a competitor, business owners will tell you, said Zulfiqar, who is president of RKR Media Associates.

The field of similar names has become crowded in Temecula, where Southwest County's real-estate market first began to boom. Competing with Collins' site are temvlyhomes.com, the Web site of a discount brokerage franchise, and temeculavalleyhomes.com, which a local Coldwell Banker franchise uses to advertise its properties.

The field in Menifee is also filling up -- or expanding, depending on how you look at it. The Coldwell Banker franchise has made its Web site available at menifeehomes.com, which it registered more than four years ago.

Jauregui, who registered menifeerealestate.com, menifeeland.com and menifeevalley.com just last year, said the value of a domain name often derives from the number of real estate agents who work in a community. The Southwest Riverside County Association of Realtors, whose home turf includes both Temecula and Menifee, lists about 3,000 members.

Virtual appreciation

Jauregui has registered more than a dozen domain names, for housing markets stretching from Ramona to Joshua Tree. He said he had to buy about one-third of them away from people and companies who had already registered them, at prices of $200 to $1,000.

Most of those appeared to be speculators, who sought from the beginning to profit off the domain names by registering them and selling that registration status to companies that plan to build Web sites on those names, Jauregui said.

Such speculators are common on the 'Net. At temeculahouses.com, the only thing listed for sale is the address temeculahouses.com. Internet directories list the site as registered to a Ted Graham, of Gig Harbor, Wash., who didn't return calls or e-mails seeking comment.

Murrieta resident Steve Abat remembered a former employer who paid $250,000 to buy a domain name from a family-owned trucking company with a similar three-letter name.

Abat, who recently launched the informational Web site mymurrieta.com, registered a dozen or so additional domain names such as murrietasmog.com and murrietakids.com, with the idea of selling a few of them. He said he never got more than $35.

But he has held on to other sites that he says he might end up using to direct more Web traffic to mymurrieta.com, which he runs as a business by selling advertising spots to local businesses. By showing that he can draw more potential users to his Web site, where they'll see the ads, he'll be able to charge more for each ad he posts.

It could take time to build up a base of regulars, Abat said. Other local competitors have entered the business at temeculavalley.biz, temeculaonline.com and -- most recently -- xploracity.com.

The best-established competitor, Temelink, operates an informational Web site that's accessible at murrietainformation.com, temeculainformation.com, temeculavalley411.com, temeculainformation.org, temeculainformation.net, and more than 50 other domain names. Temelink began its life as a long-distance telephone provider around 1990, and has been providing information on the Web since the mid-1990s.

"Web sites are a marathon, not a footrace," Abat said. "You have to be there for a long time before people get comfortable with you."

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.

http://www:xploracity.com

http://www:temeculavalley.biz

http://www:temeculaonline.com