In March, Social.org sold for well over $200,000 on NameJet. Unfortunately for the seller and NameJet, the winning bidder failed to pay, and his account was suspended. I didn’t receive confirmation, but it would seem that the underbidders did not opt to move forward at their high bids either.

NameJet has re-scheduled the auction for Social.org, and the current high bid is $7,501. There are almost 350 bidders involved in the auction, many of whom presumably didn’t delete the name from their backorders and were re-entered after the first auction closed. The name will go to auction in a little over 16 days from today.

The lost sale is a bummer for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest issues is that there was considerable publicity for the auction, and the second time around will probably see much less coverage. It’s too bad the owner couldn’t (or didn’t) go after the person who placed the winning bid. Perhaps he could go after him legally if the second auction ends at a lower price than the first auction.

Hopefully there will be a better bidder verification system in place for this auction.

In March of this year, NameJet held an auction for Social.org, and the domain name sold for $228,600. The sales price wasn’t much of a surprise considering Social.com sold for a reported $2.6 million.

Unfortunately, the Social.org deal has fallen through. I just heard from the owner of the domain name, and he informed me that the winning bidder did not pay for the auction. I would assume the second and third highest bidders (who also bid above $200,000) weren’t interested in going through with the deal at their high bids either.

As you might expect, the owner is disappointed at the outcome, but he is working with NameJet to schedule another auction for later this summer. Here’s what he had to say:

“I’m disappointed that the auction winner defaulted, but perhaps this is an opportunity to put such a powerful name into stronger hands. It combines the enormously popular ‘social’ keyword with the ‘Org’ extension that is commonly used by community/social sites such as Wikipedia.org, Craigslist.org, WordPress.org, and Google’s OpenSocial.org. I’m working with Namejet to schedule a re-auction in July.”

I reached out to NameJet about this and was told the winning bidder’s account has been banned from future bidding, and the company will do everything in its power to ensure that the bidder does not participate in any future NameJet auctions. The company is continuing to work on ways to tighten up the verified bidder process.

While this auction didn’t result in a sale, I do think it will eventually sell for a lot of money.

For the last year or so, NameJet has been permitting private auctions. They’ve had considerable success with them, primarily because most domain investors use its platform daily. Hundreds of domain names sell daily, and the platform offers liquidity for domain owners, and it’s a good bet that domain names will sell for market value.

I just learned that a private seller has put 47 three letter .com domain names on NameJet.  All of the auctions are “no reserve” and they will sell to the highest bidder at the conclusion of the auction. The auctions will run over 2 weeks starting, from June 15-June 26, and they will be closing June 18-29th.

You can have a look at the auction list here, but I have posted the 47 names below for your convenience.