In April of this year, I submitted an offer to buy Neighbor.com. At the time I made my offer, Neighbor.com was forwarding to the LunchBots.com. LunchBots are neat, stainless-steel food storage containers that are particularly helpful for sending lunch to school with children. The founder of LunchBots was the registrant of Neighbor.com, and she was using Neighbor.com to send traffic to LunchBots’ website.

When I made my purchase offer, I was told the price to buy Neighbor.com was $300,000 and the figure was non-negotiable. This was beyond what I would pay for the domain name, so I passed on the opportunity. I just learned that Neighbor.com sold recently. Unfortunately, the former owner declined to disclose the final sale price.

Neighbor.com was acquired by Neighbor, “a peer-to-peer storage company that connects hosts with unused space to renters in need of affordable storage.” Since the company was founded in 2017, Neighbor has raised $4.1 million in funding, according to CrunchBase.

I needed to re-add a domain name to my marketplace account, and I spent a few minutes trying to find the previous asking price. While looking through my emails, I found an exchange I had a couple of years ago with a prospective buyer. He offered $1,000 to buy the domain name, and I had it priced at $15,000. For whatever reason, he was perturbed that I owned the domain name as an investment.

Instead of responding to him in kind with insults or defensive commentary, I chose to de-escalate. The purpose of my reply, as I recall, was to show that the domain name is valuable, is coveted by others, and he should understand that it might not be available to buy at all had someone else owned it. I was pretty certain this wasn’t going to end in a deal, but nobody wins in a pissing contest.

I don’t think I have had a negotiation like this since, but I would definitely consider reusing this reply if necessary:

In June of this year, the Signet.com domain name sold byGarry Chernoff for $300,000 via Afternic. This sale is presently one of the 25 largest publicly reported domain name sales of 2018. Until recently, the buyer of the domain name was private, but we now know the domain name was acquired by Signature Bank.

Signature Bank will be using Signet.com for a proprietary digital payments platform. Per the website, the platform will officially launch on January 1, 2019. The company distributed a press release earlier this month to introduce the Signet platform. Here’s an excerpt from the release with more details about Signet: