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Out of the nearly 200 domains on the auction block - only 16 were sold during the auction. (2 have bids post auction). The auction didnt start off right, as it ran through the first dozen domain names 3 times (apparently, some kind of server lag issue).  With about 300 bidders, 1 bidder one most of the domain names. It seems that there was a fan of “real estate” and “loan” related keywords as those represented the most of the domains. One domain garnished quite a bit of attention as a bidding war ensued for BuilderLoans.com - which drove it from $1k starting price to $8k. The Seller, Jamie Zoch was surprised with the results. He expected a bidding war, just not on that domain. Another one of his submitted: GenuineGold.com which also was listed with a starting price of 1k but recieved not a single bid.

Lessons learned from the auction? Time to be pickier with the quality of the domain names and the starting prices. And if you dont market directly to end-users, your not going to sell domain names at these prices. Out of the 5 domains we submitted, none of them recieved any bids. I must say I wasnt that surprised. DomainTools now has 60 days from Jan 3 to either sell the domain names for 10% less than auction reserves as per the contract. Although I doubt they will sell any, we will wait and see.

I will go ahead on the record and let those of you reading this blog know that very shortly, NameBio using the brand ClickItOut, will begin holding bi weekly (and eventually weekly) domain auctions. Stay tuned for more info!

Justin