Do Real Estate Agents Get It?

Elliot Silver
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72

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve had some good success selling geographic (city/town .com) domain names lately. In many cases, I emailed real estate agents in the area offering to sell the city or town .com domain name to them rather than to domain investors, and the response rate was horrible. In fact, I only received a couple replies in total.

Based on this, I have to ask if real estate agents get it when it comes to generic geographic domain names. The one reply that actually gave me a bit of insight was, “the domain name is too broad” which makes some sense, but considering that I hadn’t even mentioned the price, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me. If the name was cheap, why not take the broad domain name and use it for more narrow purposes?

In some cases, I’ve noticed real estate agents own some great city or town .com names, but even some of those people don’t seem to “get it.” Case in point, a Realtor who owns a bunch of town .com domain names wasn’t interested in buying one of my domain names in his area (he was the second reply with just a “no thanks”). This was a town that is listed on his website as an area he services, and he has listings in that area. When he replied that he wasn’t interested in buying, I figured he might want to sell some of his names, so I asked if he’d sell his names, and he said no to that as well.

If the guy doesn’t think the names are valuable enough to buy more of them (he didn’t even ask the price of my name), why wouldn’t he be open to offers to sell these assets that aren’t valuable enough to buy? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

I know people either use direct navigation or search engines to research the cities and towns in which they are considering a move. A Realtor could use a .com geodomain name to supply information on real estate and town information, and it would probably rank high in the search engines for the search term. IMO, this would be good for lead generation, and it would certainly be easy to remember on a business card or yard sign.

This leads me to the question asked in the title of this post – do real estate agents get it when it comes to domain names?

What has your experience been?

Swift Rank Investing in Hotel & Travel Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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31

As many people probably did after learning that Rick Schwartz sold SydneyHotels.com for $100k, I spent some time searching for city Hotels.com domain names to see who owns them and how many are developed. Just about all of the domain names I looked up are developed, which says to me that there is money in that business.

I was reading the comments on Rick’s Blog, and as is typical for Rick’s Blog, there was at least one negative comment alluding to the fact that the domain name has privacy guard and the owner’s info can’t be seen. For those of you who have any doubt about Rick’s sale, I can confirm that the buyer was in fact Swift Rank, and the company is an active domain buyer.

I’ve done some business with Swift Rank, having sold them some travel-related domain names last year. The company owns a considerable number of exact match geographical travel domain names in the car, hotel, restaurant, and travel verticals. Just about all of the company’s domain names are developed.

The company’s purchase of SydneyHotels.com probably isn’t their only   large recent acquisition. Swift Rank also owns the following great names, some of which were recent:

  • BostonHotels.com – Owned by Frank Schilling as of 6/21
  • LasVegasHotels.com
  • DelhiHotels.com
  • HongKongHotel.com
  • SaintKittsandNevisHotels.com
  • NewYorkRestaurants.com
  • SanFranciscoRestaurant.com

I would venture a guess that if you own any great City Hotels.com domain names (or other generic travel domain names), Swift Rank may be interested in discussing an acquisition.

BikeAmsterdam.com: Trade a Domain Name for a Bike

Elliot Silver
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6

In the last several months, I’ve picked up a new hobby – biking. Although it’s not easy biking around New York City (except in Central Park, which can also be a nightmare), I have enjoyed taking my bike out for long rides. As a result of this newish hobby, I’ve rented bikes on recent vacations as a way to explore a city.

After my last trip, I did a few searches for city-specific biking domain names, and I saw BikeAmsterdam.com had expired and was set to go to auction. I backordered it, and after a short three-day auction, I won the domain name. I don’t plan to develop it, but with biking being such a popular thing in Amsterdam, I think the name is valuable to any company that rents bikes or gives bike tours.

I sent out a number of emails to bike tour companies in Amsterdam last night, and I already received a couple of inquiries in response, so now it’s just about making a deal that works for both parties. I made a special offer to the bike companies who presumably have the ability to purchase bikes at their wholesale price:

BikeAmsterdam.com will either cost $3,000 USD or I will trade the domain name for a new road bike. The three choices are:

You may notice the MSRP is actually less than the $3,000 price for all three bikes. I know this, and it’s intentional. I want to see if I can trade a bike for a domain name. If anyone is interested in this opportunity, the domain name is still available until a deal is worked out.

Thoughts on the e.CO Auction

Elliot Silver
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6

I know there is an active discussion about the e.CO auction happening on Mike’s Blog and TechCrunch, but I want to share my thoughts on it because I have a unique perspective. It was reported that B52 and its CEO Lonnie Borck won the domain name for $81,000. Lonnie is one of my closest colleagues in this industry as well as a good friend outside of the business, and I was with him at the auction and after.

In my opinion, this was a very strong speculative acquisition. The .CO registry and it’s registrar partners are spending a lot of money on marketing the extension to ensure consumers know about it. .CO makes total sense for companies to use, and in fact, many companies use similar extensions in other countries – think .CO.UK and .CO.IL. I already gave some of my thoughts on .CO.

With the news that Twitter will be integrating T.CO into its system as the preferred URL shortener, and that there are many applications for the .CO Founder’s Program as well as already awarded domain names (Angel.co and Disrupt.co as examples), I think .CO is going to be big. As a one character domain name in this extension, E.CO will be worth much more than the purchase price assuming things play out like we believe they will, although Lonnie’s team acquired this domain name for a specific reason and may not be inclined to sell it.

I want to address a couple of comments made about Lonnie in the two aforementioned articles.

1) Regarding the charity being kept private: Lonnie is a fiercely private person, and he does not wish to disclose the charity recipient(s) publicly. Some people like to flaunt who they support and by how much, but that’s not Lonnie’s way to do things.

2) Regarding Lonnie’s smarts in this space: Keep in mind this public information – his company sold Scores.com for $1,200,000, owns Funding.com, Bookmarks.com, Shock.com, Winter.com, Camera.net, and Baby.net. He also owns a number of other considerable domain names that aren’t publicly known.

I think the acquisition of E.CO was a shrewd investment, and the charitable organization(s) that will benefit will certainly be very appreciative.

The “Winner” Is…

Elliot Silver
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15

I want to thank everyone who took the time to post a comment in my blog post about trying to help someone buy a domain name to sell to an end user. I think that post had more comments than just about any other post I’ve written. I apologize for the delay in announcing this, but I’ve had a lot of emails that needed attention after my trip.

I don’t really want to say “winner” because it’s not a competition, but I can’t really think of a more appropriate term for the person who was randomly selected. I will hopefully be able to work with this person individually using our combined knowledge and experience to register a domain name that will be coveted by an end user buyer, and if things work out, the name(s) will sell for a few hundred dollars. At the very least, this person will learn how I research potential acquisitions and then find buyers for them.

Without further interruption, the person who was selected is Alan Patrick. I will be sending Alan an email tomorrow morning to let him know personally about this, and I look forward to begin working on this early next week.

Pros and Cons of Selling New Registrations Cheaply to End User Buyers

Elliot Silver
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4

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about a few of my recent end user sales on new registrations that were for less than $1,000 each. A couple of people have made comments and sent emails asking about whether these lower value sales are worth the time and effort when it can take a similar amount of time and effort to sell a much higher value domain name at a significantly higher profit. These comments are worth addressing because they are valid concerns.

One of the primary reasons I became fascinated by the domain investment business was because I could virtually create something from nothing, pay around $10, and sell the name to someone else for a nice profit. Much like some people go on vacations where they can dig for gold, hunt for gems, or search for other objects of value at a minimal cost, domain investing at this basic level is exciting to me.

Don’t get me wrong, my company wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for the high dollar sales, but I enjoy creating names after doing research and then flipping them for a large profit.

Below are a few pros and cons to consider regarding selling new registrations to end users:

PRO: When buying newly registered domain names, there is far less risk than paying $5,000, $10,000 or $50,000 for a domain name in the after market. If it sells for anything over $10, I will make a profit (not considering the cost of my time to research, contact, negotiate, and transact).

CON: If a newly registered domain name sells for $1,000, there’s a huge profit margin, but the actual realized profit would not be enough t sustain my business unless there was a significant number of these sales each month.

PRO: There is very little carrying cost to domain names that don’t sell. If I buy a $10 name and email 30 companies who don’t express an interest, the cost to maintain the domain name is just $10 a year, and I can later decide whether it’s worth keeping.

CON: Although I don’t usually (well, ever) purchase dozens or hundreds of domain names at a time, I know there are plenty of people who do.   Despite the fact that a domain name can cost $10 to register, if you own dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these new domain names that generate no parking revenue, the carrying cost on virtually worthless domain names can be considerable.

PRO: It’s fairly easy to find decent unregistered domain names that would be coveted by companies in those specific markets.

CON: It can be very easy to go overboard, purchase thousands of dollars in domain names that don’t receive any interest from potential buyers, and those thousands of dollars could have been spent on one very good domain name.

PRO: Making the decision to buy a $1,000 domain name can be easy for some end users and not require approval from higher levels at a company because the cost is relatively low. This generally makes transactions go quickly.

CON: Some companies may not like the idea of enriching you when you literally just spent $10 to buy the domain name and turned around and asked for $1,000.

PRO: Deals under $1,000 can be done very easily (and quickly) using Paypal, and the cost of escrow is relatively cheap.

CON: New registrations can’t be transferred to a different domain registrar within the first 60 days of registration, which could pose a problem for a buyer.

Ultimately, I think it might be wise for domain investors to try to buy interesting domain names for end user sales slowly and pitch the names to potential buyers. If you find that you aren’t having luck, perhaps hiring a domain consultant (NOT me) might be beneficial. It’s a good idea to hone your domain research, sales, and negotiation skills on lower value domain names before moving up and making more expensive investments.

Selling newly registered domain names is a small aspect of my business, but it’s been enjoyable for me so I am thinking about doing it more frequently as time permits.

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