Buying Domain Names

If you look at the major domain name sales platforms, you will likely come across listings that aren’t legitimate. Sometimes a domain owner makes a typo when listing a domain name for sale, sometimes a domain owner has already sold a domain name and didn’t remove a listing, and other times people are simply messing around for whatever reason and list domain names they do not own. Domain name ownership verification still stinks on many platforms.

GDPR and Whois privacy are two issues that may cause verification issues. I believe most platforms have alternative methods of proving ownership though. In the case of domain names that were once owned by someone who listed a domain name for sale but later sold, I think it’s a pretty big challenge for sales platforms to be able to check the Whois or DNS records on millions of domain names every day to be sure listings remain valid.

I noticed a domain name in auction recently that looked funky to me. The domain name was very old, had been unlocked and relocked without transfer, and it had an active website on it. Put simply, I found it peculiar that the domain name was listed for sale in an auction. Before I placed a bid, I needed to get confirmation that the listing was legitimate.

There have been plenty of times where something about an auction looked off, but it turned out to be legitimate. There have probably been more times where something looked off and it was either a fake listing, a case of theft, or something else that made the auction problematic. If I can prevent it, I would rather hold off on placing a binding bid than have to deal with a problem later.

Hedge funds and private investors that invest serious amounts of money in publicly traded companies have many tactics to understand how a company is performing before financial reports are given. People are hired to count cars in parking lots, check inventory on retail sales floors, ask employees of suppliers for production details, and a variety of other means to ascertain non-public information. Domain investors should consider a similar strategy using different tactics.

I am not an investor in non .com domain names. That should be pretty obvious. Despite this, I am emailed regularly asking me for thoughts on buying new gTLD domain names. I believe investors would benefit from doing end user market analysis to check their investment viability. This is important for non-.com domain names, but it could also be done for the non-blue chip .coms (one word, 3/4 letter…etc), too. People should understand the market before investing thousands of dollars in speculative domain names.

Here’s what I would do if I was going to the legwork to evaluate investment viability for a type of domain name I was unsure about: