Vet's Web hot spot not for sale

So far, veteran.com hasn't taken off, but he's confident it will.

By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE, Times Staff Writer
Published November 12, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [David Degner | Times] Like many vets who left the service Steve Lecarpentier, 46, wanted to reconnect with the people he had met along the way. Upon leaving the Army after 22 years, he knew his hobby would have to be related to the military, so he built a social website for other military veterans at www.veteran.com. The site was launched five weeks ago, and according to Lecarpentier, is getting hundreds of new members each week. Slide show: Bay area veterans talk about their service Veterans Day closings

WESLEY CHAPEL - It's as if Steve Lecarpentier owns a prime piece of real estate on a busy corner in a thriving metropolis.

A perfect spot for a business.

Eager potential buyers sometimes call, flashing fat wallets. Lecarpentier paid just $500 for his property in 2001. He knows he could make a killing. A similar site recently sold for $99,000.

But veteran.com isn't for sale.

Lecarpentier wants to give veterans a cyber site to come together on the Web and veteran.com is their meeting place. So far, the 46-year-old has attracted just 400 users to a Web site that's 2 months old. But he thinks the veterans will find him in time.

After all, he's got a great address. Not that he'll sell.

"I view it like the family farm," Lecarpentier said. "It's not like some lot on the beach you'd sell to make a bundle. It's like grandpa's farm, where the family comes together for Christmas dinner. You don't sell grandpa's farm."

Lecarpentier swears he isn't interested in a sale.

"Selling would be like betraying military families," he said.

Lecarpentier might be an anomaly in a tech world seemingly gone mad. Premier Internet domain names are selling for big bucks. Web kingpins and ordinary citizens are speculating in Web addresses, trading them like commodities.

Porn.com fetched $9.5-million. Army.org sold for $99,000. Seniors.com garnered $1.8-million. Even pimple.com found a buyer for $82,500.

Lecarpentier is a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income. He said he doesn't want to make a fortune. Working out of a spare room in his Wesley Chapel home, he tinkers on a site without advertising.

Players on the Internet say he is sitting on a shining asset.

"If I had to guess, I'd say it's worth over $100,000," said Scott Gallagher, chairman of FTS Group in Oldsmar, which specializes in developing Web-based businesses.

One of the stallions in Gallagher's stable of domain names is eboxing.com, which he hopes will soon soar in value.

Fortunes are being made online. "It's real estate without the taxes," Gallagher said.

In the summer of 2001, Lecarpentier was closing a 20-year career in the Army. A bad back plagued him. Stationed in Germany, the MP sergeant was taking computer classes and planning retirement.

One of his lessons involved building Web sites. That got Lecarpentier thinking. Maybe he could build his own page. He looked around to find a good Web address. He thought he might post his homework online.

He checked some Internet sites that show what's available and who owns the ones that aren't. Today, people can register available sites for under $10 a year from companies like Godaddy.com.

At first, Lecarpentier settled on usvet.net. He thought it was a pretty catchy.

Then he typed in veteran.com on his computer. An error message came up, indicating the Web page wasn't in use. But someone owned it.

Lecarpentier dashed off an e-mail to the owner asking if he would give it up. He got a message from a lawyer working for Internet giant Yahoo.com. The company had done an appraisal on the site a year before.

The price tag: $20,000.

Lecarpentier responded that he couldn't afford that. Yahoo, which did not return calls for this story, lowered the price to $5,000.

Lecarpentier then reminded the lawyer in an e-mail that Internet stocks were tanking. The dot.com bubble had burst. In a fit of moxie, he offered $500.

Lecarpentier said he was dumbfounded when Yahoo accepted - on the condition that Lecarpentier host the site on Yahoo for three years. That cost an extra $15 to $20 per month.

Once back in Florida, Lecarpentier toyed with several business ideas for the site.

Then he began thinking how difficult it was to keep track of old friends in the military. They always promised to keep in touch but invariably lost each other's phone numbers and addresses.

The Web provided the perfect way for veterans to stay connected. His site offers a variety of free services, from the ability to post videos and send friends e-mails to descriptions of members time in the service.

"I'm not really aiming to make money off of it," Lecarpentier said.

The Internet has no shortage of social networking sites for the nation's 24-million veterans. Some competitors salivate at the thought of grabbing a domain name like Lecarpentier's.

People have called Lecarpentier out of the blue asking to negotiate. Some have offered $5,000 for his address. Lecarpentier figures they would go much higher with some haggling.

"There's huge competition," said John Steadman, Houston-based co-founder of usvetspace.com. "When he turns 65 and is ready to retire, he can sell it and move to the Bahamas."

Information on the value of domain name sales came from DNJournal.com, an industry news magazine.

[Last modified November 12, 2007, 01:20:32]