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Many new domainers come into our industry with little information and eyes filled with dollar signs. They buy the fad domains or domains with little to no resale value what so ever. They dream of the big ticket items like major keyword .com’s but quickly learn that there is no chance (without a sizable investment) of getting their hands on those domain names.

The truth is, just below those top grade domain names is a huge market of what I call “Sub-Prime domains”. These are domain names that still have reseller value, and end-user potential. They are mostly 2 keywords, but have a reasonable level of keyword searches (People are searching for those keywords on Search Engines). These domains arent as liquid as a major keywords but there are plenty of eager buyers just waiting to snap them up. The best part about these sub-prime domains? They can be acquired at steep discounts. Many of them have sat on registrar parked pages for years, the original registrant never having gotten his idea off the ground but continually renewing it in the hope that he just might.

A new domainer can break into this market quite easily, just by being creative and contacting the original registrants directly. I always recommend phone calls as oppose to emails, many people change emails throughout the years, phone numbers ususally last longer.  In order to pull off an acquisition on a sub-prime domain you’ll need at least a few hundred dollars and free long distance calls. Get on that phone and make some calls. I might recommend not disclosing that you are a domain investor. This usually will drive the original registrant to try out the instant appraisal services, and then they come back asking for a fortune.

Good luck and Happy Hunting,

Justin

From now on, each week Im going to post a “Deals and Steals” posting. The idea is to highlight some of the better deals (In my opinion) that were acquired in the previous week. This past week 2 sales caught my attention.

1. SnowResorts.com - $2,700 @ NameJet (3/18/08).

I happened to love this name, and was watching it while at auction. I was a bit surprised it didnt do double that price. I think the owner made out well. Considering how much Winter resorts can cost, there is a huge market for Winter activities and Snow Resorts are a popular past time.

2. IncomeOpportunity.com - $6,900 @ NameJet (3/17/08)

This name is a flat faced beauty. Everyones looking to get rich, and people will pay big for ideas. How many “work from home” type spams do you get? Quite frankly, there is big business in selling people business. I think this is a top domain for that. I think the owner got a heck of a deal on this one.

Did you see any domains sell recently that you thought were steals? Feel free to post them in the comment section for discussion!

Thanks,

Justin

Although the NameJet sales feed has been up and running for nearly a week, its incredible to see how much more data were able to see about the domain market. Each day we monitor the top backordered domain names on the Namejet Platform, this feed alone is adding between 35-50 additional domain sales per day to the database. Right now were seeing about 100 new domains to the database per day between the major auction houses and privately submitted sales.

The way we see it is in the near future nearly all domain sales will be reported to our database and in doing so, will make it one of the most important resources for researching value. We hope everyone is enjoying the new sales data as we continue to bring more and more. Expect to see several new feeds added in the next few weeks.

Justin

Possibly the highest selling domain name of all time, Fund.com is being reported by CNN as having sold in a transaction for $9,999,950 in an all cash transaction. Cleck Media Inc negotiated the and closed the deal. According to the CNN article it suggests that Fund.com is the highest reported domain sale of all time, despite the rumored sale of Sex.com for $12 million.

What does this mean for the Market of domains? Its about to heat up. The more positive exposure our industry recieves on major news venues the more serious we will be taken. Expect to see more and more curious investors looking to diversify.

Justin

I am finaly happy to announce that we have added a new sales feed from NameJet. This means everyday we will get 10-20 new domain sales. This is not a complete listing of all domain sales that occur on that platform, but we should get several of the top names per day. This should greatly improve the search ability of domain names, and give a better perspective of value.

NameJet.com has come a long way in a short period of time. They are no one of the hottest marketplaces because of their direct ties to Network Solutions and Enom. Most of the worlds most valuable domain names are registered with Network Solutions, so when they drop NameJet automatically gets them. I am excited to have this feed, and its something I’ve been waiting to add for quite a while.

Thanks,

Justin

When you have a database of around 30,000 domain sales dating back through through 2001, you can run a few interesting stats. Recently I did a scan for domain names sold between 2004 and 2007 to see if any of them were now available. Surprisingly enough, I found quite a bit of domain names that were. Granted, many of them were junk, or had a few dollars in regards to their sale prices, but I did manage to register a few possible gems based on previous sales:

TradingLevel.com sold for $150 through Afternic’s Bazaar back in Jan of 2007

and

OffMyBack.com which sold for $1,300 through Afternic in August of 2005

Does that mean I just made $1,450 - Registration costs ($14 ish). Nope. All this means is that whomever valued these domains failed to renew them, or decided they no longer needed them. There were quite a bit more which were available, but quite frankly weren’t that good. However, here is a short list of domain names that sold at some point (From anywhere for a few bucks on upwards), but were available to register as of yesterday:

• 123Closed.com
• DigiBlurbs.com
• BustyCoed.net
• RomancingChicago.com
• HotelsInFlorida.us
• OfficiallySold.com
• GiftsForABaby.com
• Hundredz.com
• eSalePrice.com
• CorrectionalSupply.com
• MyGlobalPharmacy.com
• NoAgentRealty.com
• JobSnare.com
• URLDiggers.com
• EverythingCuban.com
• ReachoutMusic.com
• CasualSportswear.net
• EuropeanClass.com
• VegasGuide.biz
• CollectJudgements.net (all other TLDs taken)

Hope you enjoyed. Please add a comment if you decided to register any or all.

Justin

This morning I was alerted to a scam involving high end stolen domain names (one of the domains was Fucked.com). As it turns out this scam may involve the Iranian hacker and a foolish kid in Canada who goes by the handle 9MM on both DNF and NP (His NamePro’s account had been banned previous to this incident). However as it seems several adult domain names were stolen by using a hacked email account and were sold to a few DNF members.

There are claims that it was upwards of a $600,000 but so far only one member has claimed to have purchased 3 of the domains for just over $100,000. If you have some time, as it stands right now the thread is about 15 pages long, but it is interesting as the story and lies unfold.

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In the past few months, their have been a rash of reported thefts involving domain names and paypal. In most cases it is the seller who is out of luck when a paypal charge back occurs, and they have no recourse to get their domain names back. Also, there is the potential that a buyer sends money and the buyer never pushes the domain names to his account. Either way, this can be very problematic for one of the most popular payment systems that is being utilized in our industry.

Solutions? Demand escrow. There are several escrow services out there (Moniker, Sedo, Escrow.com) that offer a decent service for a reasonable fee. Considering you lose money to paypal anyway, why not invest a few extra dollars in the security of knowing this is a safe move. There are a few critics who point out that Escrow.com’s service, is not full proof as it does not take control of the domain name and for that I do agree. However, I will say that their is a small element of risk, but for which you get a better and often cheaper service then the others.

Escrow.com is faster, better communicators, and as I said earlier, usually cheaper then Sedo or Moniker. (Especially on larger transactions). If a seller doesn’t want to use Escrow for a transaction over $500, then you very well should rethink doing business with that individual. I recently had the pleasure of dealing with someone who lived internationally who insisted on paypal. Quite frankly, I couldn’t take the risk. The sale fell apart.

Yesterday at my home one of our dogs jumped up and shattered a very large window. Fortunately, he only received minor cuts to his paws. However, I was forced to locate a window repair company. I first started off as I normally do, using Google and typing in my search phrase “Home Window Repair, Tempe AZ”. This pulled up several sponsored listings, and a few down the page that looked promising.

I was looking for a quote on an obscure sized window (very large). As I went through the first page of results (including the sponsored listings) I found that some of them only did Auto Windshields, and others didn’t bother answering the phone. I became a bit frustrated and continued to search through the listings. Once it started to look pretty desperate I did what I hadn’t done in about 5 years. I pulled out the yellow pages and found about 20 companies that did window repair.

I continued to ponder the issue this morning. I came to the conclusion that local search, just isn’t cutting it yet with most of the search engines.  I went back and checked the same search string at Yahoo, Ask, and MSN with very similar results. What does this tell me? Quite frankly there is a huge opening for anyone dedicated enough to build a local search engine. Honestly? The company that I could see pulling this off the best? Craigslist.

Just my thoughts,

Justin

With their “Leap Day Auction” being basically the identical auction they had a month ago, the results were not much different. Approximately $30k in domain sales, but not a single bid during the live event. All bids were received pre-auction, and almost none of the original domains sold. Clearly this was a last ditch effort by DomainTools to try and sell some of those domain names before their exclusive listing contract is up.

I can only assume that Domaintools figured what do they have to lose? Well, for starters. Reputation. It is clear that Domaintools is not making an effort to market their auction properly, and its clear they are not a preferred market. Very few domain names are selling through this platform, and with sub par auctions, and a pretty weak format for accepting domains, why would any decent portfolio holder continue to offer up their gems?

One more failed event from Domaintools and I think they need to be removed from consideration all together.

There is a beacon of light around the corner through. Those of you who prefer to see domains sold via live bidding and those who like to try and find some deals. A new live auction system is just around the bend. Stay Tuned!

Justin