I use NameBio on a regular basis for blog research as well as general domain investment research. The domain name sales data dating back many years has considerable value to me because it is helpful when writing blog posts and when buying or selling domain names. When NameBio announced its membership program, I immediately took advantage of the saved search functionality.
Over a year ago, I tried to buy Prove.com, but the six figure price tag of the domain name was beyond what I could spend for it as an investment. Using the DomainTools Whois History tool, I can see that Prove.com sold sometime between April and July of this year. I just learned that a New York company called Payfone recently acquired Prove.com, and the company announced a rebrand to Prove earlier this week:
We are thrilled to announce that @payfone is now @ProveIdentity! Representing a new era of modern identity authentication & a reaffirmation of our mission: to help companies reach their goals by enabling them to authenticate customers accurately, effortlessly, and privately. pic.twitter.com/i2sXpMNy87
— Prove Identity (@ProveIdentity) July 29, 2020
This morning on Twitter, domain investor Andy Booth tweeted about a successful domain name flip he recently made. Andy reportedly sold Abby.com for $75,000. He bought the domain name in June of this year for $55,000. That would be a little more than a 36% ROI in less than 2 months:
SOLD https://t.co/pRxG5W4RN9 to an end-user @ 75k. Purchased: June 2020 @ 55k.
High reseller price I think, but the buyer’s timing was right for me, so he got a reasonable deal IMO.
— Andy Booth (@Chain) July 30, 2020
According to an article in the New York Times a little over a week ago, a new professional US women’s soccer team has been established. The NWSL expansion team will begin playing during the 2022 season, and it will call Los Angeles its home. A number of famous women make up the ownership group, including Mia Hamm, Natalie Portman, Eva Longoria, Serena Williams, and many others. The franchise will be known as Angel City.
Escrow.com published and shared its Domain Investment Index for the second quarter of 2020, and the report was fairly bleak. In fact, as you can clearly see on the quarterly comparison chart on page 2, Q2 2020 had the lowest quarterly sales volume in two years, since Escrow.com began compiling the report. The full report pdf can be downloaded here, and I want to share a few thoughts about Q2.
In Q2, Escrow.com processed $55.2 million in domain name sales, down from $85.8 million in Q1. It looks like the previous low sales figures were in the high $60 to low $70 million range. Here’s a screengrab of the chart showing quarterly sales volume since 2018:
I read Ray Hackney’s interview with DAN.com CEO Reza Sardeha, and he mentioned that the company is “setting up a brokerage division to provide integrated buyer/seller brokerage support.” I don’t typically need broker support when negotiating a deal, but I found myself in a situation where I think having third party assistance could prove beneficial in closing a deal.
I won a pending delete auction a week ago, and the domain name was provisioned to a registrar I have used maybe once or twice. I set the DAN nameservers but did not list a BIN price, so it showed a make offer field. I was unsure if I could even sell this domain name on DAN because of the 60 day lock on new registrations (it was deleted and re-registered before the auction), so I did not want someone to execute the BIN and end up not being able to do the deal.
