Report: Owners.com Acquired for $20 Million+

A real estate website operating on an exact match .com domain name has been acquired for a considerable sum of money. Owners.com, “one of the largest marketplaces of self-directed home buyers and sellers,” was acquired by a company called Altisource Portfolio Solutions S.A. Altisource already operates a real estate auction marketplace called Hubzu.com.

According to this November 24th press release I read  this morning, “Altisource purchased the company for $20 million at closing and up to an additional $7 million in potential consideration based on revenue earned in the two consecutive 12-month periods following closing.” Obviously this is not a simple domain name sale, but it marks the sale of another business using a keyword .com domain name as a brand.

There have been several large sales and deals involving real keyword domain names and businesses that use keyword domain names as brands in the real estate s[ace. Some of these sales and deals include the following domain names and businesses:

Inc. Magazine Shares Stories of Domain Acquisitions

Yesterday evening, I posted an article about the purchase price for Nuts.com, which was revealed in an Inc. magazine article. This morning, the easier to read version of the article, Stalking That Dream .Com: True Tales From The Front Lines of the URL Wars,” was published online.

There are several takeaways from the article that might interest you and will perhaps benefit your business. From an interest standpoint, the acquisitions of Mint.com, Nuts.com, Hired.com, and several other domain names are discussed. The buyers of these domain names discuss the prices they paid, and there is some insight shared about the value the domain names brought to the companies that bought them as well as the benefits realized by owning the domain names.

From a business standpoint,

Inc. Magazine Reveals Price of Nuts.com

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Soon after NutsOnline.com rebranded to the shorter Nuts.com domain name, the company saw a major decrease in traffic. The New York Times published an article about the company’s rebranding and the impact it had on the business, and several other websites wrote about the issue faced by the company after it chose to rebrand. Many of the articles referenced this Google Webmasters Help forum thread started by the company after noticing ranking issues in Google.

With all of the publicity about the rebranding to Nuts.com and the search engine problems that seemed to follow, I did not see any coverage of the acquisition cost of the domain name. An article in the December / January edition of Inc. magazine reveals information about the negotiation and the purchase price.

According to the article, Jeff Braverman, the CEO of NutsOnline.com, spent quite a bit of time tracking down the owner of the Nuts.com domain name and negotiating with him. Two years after the initial failed negotiation, he saw that the domain name was listed for sale, and he bought it for

List of Domain Sales Newsletters

Many of the top domain name brokers and domain brokerages have weekly or monthly domain sales newsletters. Typically, these newsletters have lists of domain names that are available for sale exclusively through the broker or brokerage. Some of the also include market commentary, which I think is particularly interesting given a domain broker’s position in the resale market.

Some of the best domain purchase opportunities can be found in these newsletters because many aren’t shared publicly, and the prices don’t necessarily reflect actual market value. For example, I saw a broker list a domain name for sale a couple of months ago with a $12,000 purchase price and it recently sold on a public venue almost double. This indicates that there may be better deals available in private than if there was a public auction.

I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of the current domain broker and brokerage email newsletters. There may be others that I don’t know about or accidentally omitted, so feel free to post a comment if you know of another newsletter. I would prefer to only list third party brokers as opposed to individuals who sell their own domain names because that’s a different type of newsletter.

I recommend using a third party escrow service (I personally use Escrow.com) or a trusted attorney that has an escrow account when dealing with a broker, even if the company is willing to provide escrow services. It’s also important to do your standard due diligence to make sure the listing is legit. I trust most of the professional domain brokers, but I trust my own due diligence above all.

Domain name sale broker newsletters (in alphabetical order):

NameJet Makes It Easier to List Domain Names for Sale

I have heard and read quite a few complaints about the difficulty in privately listing domain names for sale on NameJet. From what I understand, the company has not added on many private sellers for a variety of reasons, with the primary reason being the lack of a user interface for sellers to observe their auctions and payment status.

Upon logging in to my account today (after clearing my cache for another reason), I had to agree to an updated terms of service, dated December 3,
2015. Once I passed that page, I noticed a new header within my account “List Your Domains on NameJet,” and underneath the header, there is a message that says “Apply to have your domains listed on NameJet’s exclusive auction platform.”

According to NameJet General Manager Jonathan Tenenbaum,

Salesforce.com Now Owns IQ.com

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IQ.com Domain Name

Because of the high value of two letter .com domain names and the fact that quite a few have changed hands for significant sums of money during the past two years, I monitor all 676 two letter .com domain names.  This morning, I received a DomainTools domain monitor alert for IQ.com indicating that something had recently changed in the Whois record. As of this morning, the registrant of IQ.com is now Salesforce.com, as you can see in the current Whois record screenshot  posted below.

If you visit IQ.com, you can see that the domain name currently forwards