Kirkland-based Market Leader today announced the purchase of Realestate.com for $8.25 million. The asset purchase from Lending Tree includes patents, technology, trademarks and more than 400 domain names.

No employees are moving over as a result of the deal, and Market Leader will continue to operate under its own name.

But the company does plan to leverage the strong domain name and traffic from Realestate.com “to provide leads to its existing user base of over 60,000 and to reduce future operating costs.”

“We believe Market Leader is in a unique position to put this high potential website to work for the thousands of brokerage companies and agents who depend upon us for high quality software and performance marketing solutions,” said Ian Morris, CEO of Market Leader.

In the press release, SEO expert Neil Patel said that Realestate.com is one of the most recognizable addresses in the industry with a “domain authority that would be very difficult for anyone to replicate.”

Shares of Market Leader — which develops online marketing tools for real estate agents — are up seven percent on the news today. The company, with a market value of $54 million, finished the last quarter with cash, cash equivalents and short term investments of $37.7 million.

I was curious if Realestate.com ranked as one of the top real estate Web sites based on data from Experian Hitwise, but surprisingly it does not. A spokesman for Market Leader says that Realestate.com has not actively been marketed for over a year, but it still attracts some 300,000 visitors per month.

Here’s a look at the research from earlier this summer.

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