Name is now sold.
Liquidating Your Domain Names
Say that you need to cash out your domain investments ASAP. Perhaps you need to pay some bills, and you can’t afford to hold on to some of your domain names any more. Where do you turn? Right now, I don’t think there are any absolute reliable options, but I do think Bido is going to change this.
If you put your domain name up for sale on a domain forum, it’s unlikely to sell unless it’s a great name and you price it under market value. What happens is that you list your name, and if it’s not snapped up in the first several minutes, others will pass it over, and eventually it will end up on page 5 – the annals of the domain forum. You then have to lower your price, and wait and hope that someone sees it the second time around. This is no way to liquidate a domain name because it isn’t quick and you aren’t guaranteed to sell it for what the market will yield.
When you put a domain name for sale on a site like Sedo or Afternic, you are competing with hundreds of thousands of other domain names, and a quick sale is very unlikely. It’s difficult (or expensive) to stand out on one of the leading aftermarket sales sites. These sites may be good for selling a domain name, but I don’t think they’re the right venue for a quick liquidation sale.
Auctions are also good spots to sell domain names, but they aren’t close to a sure bet, and you’ll end up locking up your domain name for weeks due to auction house exclusivity. Domain brokers can be great, too – but again, you have to work with exclusivity, and competition from other listings.
So after all of this, I really think Bido is going to be a great place to sell your names quickly. People have been commenting that the sales are far from stellar. I disagree. The names for the most part have been far from stellar, so the sales prices are in line with expectations.
Yesterday, ZJP.com sold for $4,055. I believe this is in line with what other 3 letter domain names are selling for now, and it shows that the market will set the price if the starting price is below market value, which is true with Bido’s $1 auction starts. Especially at this time, you can’t expect to get end user prices by selling to domain investors.
Domainers watch Bido and observe the auctions – whether the domains are great quality or poor quality. Domainers can bring liquidity to the marketplace, and if you need cash, selling to a domain investor is usually the quickest way to make a sale. Bido offers a great platform for domain investors to get liquidity. I would imagine they will open up for more auctions soon, and that should make it easier for people to sell their names.
Tucows Sells Million Dollar Portfolio
According to an 8-K Form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission late yesterday, Tucows entered into an agreement to sell a small portfolio of 2,553 domain names for an aggregate price of $1,000,000. Payment will be made in all cash, with $900,000 being paid at the close of the sale, $50,000 in August and the final $50,000 being paid in one year.
An interesting note in the filing, states “The agreement further provides that the purchaser will be entitled to purchase up to an additional $1.8 million of domain names from Tucows.com Co. between today and June 2010 on terms similar to the Agreement.”
It would be interesting to know what terms are included in this agreement, and whether the names were sold because of their intrinsic domain value, or if they were sold based on a revenue multiple. If it was the later, I would be curious about how much of a revenue multiple it is.
Congratulations to Tucows!
Also, I want to note that I was “tipped off” to this great sale after following Tucows GM Bill Sweetman on Twitter. You can also follow DomainInvesting.com too!
Passive Aggressive Approach to Selling Domains
When you attempt to sell a domain name, you are generally in a weaker position than when someone sends you an unsolicited email to buy a domain name. In the first situation, you are trying sell a domain name on your terms, and you need to find a buyer who can meet them. In the second situation, you hold the domain name that someone else wants, and you can choose the terms. This can make a big difference when negotiating.
When you want to sell a domain name, but you would rather not start out in a weak position, I recommend attempting a passive aggressive sales approach. One idea to do this is to reach out to a domain owner who has a similar but different domain name, and ask him if he would sell his domain name. In your email, you should mention that you own XYZ.com and you would like to buy ZYX.com from him.
If you receive a reply to your request, there are generally 4 possible versions:
1) Yes, the price is $
2) Yes, make me an offer
3) I won’t sell XYZ.com, but will you sell ZYX.com?
4) No. I am not interested in selling
You can then make a sales pitch responding to each of these replies.
For the first option, if the price he names is higher than the price at which you would sell your name, you can reply, “That’s a good price, but it’s out of my price range for this name. Would you be interested in buying ZYX.com, a very comparable domain name, for the same price?”
With option two, if you reply with an offer, you should be prepared to buy his domain name if he matches your price. Assuming he says no, like 99.9% of domain owners who would say no to the first offer no matter what, then you can turn around and let him know you would sell yours, a similar name, for that price if he is interested.
For the third option, you have moved into the drivers’ seat, as you are now in a stronger position with him asking you to buy your domain name.
Although the final response isn’t always appreciated, it does show you that the domain owner is alive and answering emails. You could tell him that you had hoped to acquire XYZ.com to enhance the value of your name, ZYX.com, but since he won’t sell, maybe he would be interested in acquiring yours.
I have not sold a domain name in this manner before, but I have had the third option happen to me in the past. I was not inclined to sell the domain name, so I turned down a significant offer for it. Unsolicited domain sales via a variety of methods can be more difficult than fielding inquiries, but that’s how I sell a majority of my domain names. This is one more tool to add to your cache.
Obviously the one caveat is that your name is of equal value or better than the person who you email.
WorkOpportunities.com Now For Sale
With America’s work situation getting worse, now is a good opportunity to buy a job-related domain name. I am selling WorkOpportunities.com for $7,800. Of course the name JobOpportunities.com is a better domain name, but I also think that is easily a low to mid 6 figure domain name. People are looking to find work as the unemployment rate creeps higher. In fact, according to CNN today, unemployment is up in 98% of cities across the US.
Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can see there are about 60,500 searches per month for “work opportunities” and slightly more than 7x the number of searches for “job opportunities” at 450,000. Pretty good numbers if you ask me, and I priced it under $10,000 to move it even faster.
Additionally, there are 1,840,000 Google results for the exact quoted term “work opportunities.” There are also plenty of advertisers for this phrase as well.
I am going to list this in a couple of other spots, and as always, the first person to tell me they want it will get it. I don’t think this deal will be around very long before someone grabs it.
One idea for the site is to do build a white label automated job search site, similar to what I did on Lowell.com and Burbank.com.
DomainFest Auction Wasn’t All Bad
I think we can all agree that the Moniker live auction at DomainFest was pretty much a bomb, but I don’t really think this is a bad thing for the industry. There weren’t many bargains in the live auction, which shows that domain owners aren’t necessarily losing faith in their investments and selling their domain names for whatever the market will yield as a consequence. This shows that there is strength in domain assets, especially those that are of high value.
For the most part, it seemed that the high priced domain names that were listed were priced far too high for other domain investors to purchase. Sure, they may be worth the amount to someone with a solid business plan, but most domain investors don’t have business plans for names they plan to buy. Many have them for names they own, but it can be fruitless to build a business plan around a name that isn’t owned by us. This coupled with just a short amount of time between the final list publication and the auction, it’s not very likely that a plan can even be built.
Also, many of the names up for sale at auction have either been listed at other auction(s) recently or had been privately marketed recently. There were a couple of names I made private offers on in the last couple of months, and I decided against bidding on both (even though my offers would have equaled or superseded the reserve). Personally, I don’t like to buy at public auction, and I’ve only done so once. With a market in flux, I didn’t want to be the price setter – especially in a public auction.
So how can live auctions be improved? Mike and his readers have some good suggestions. I’ve also made a few additional suggestions in the past, mostly related to end user education. I still think it would be wise for a domain ambassador to attend a non-domain tradeshow and run small group sessions discussing the importance of generic domain names. Every single industry has tradeshows, and most tradeshows have opportunities for educational seminars. Why hasn’t any company made in-roads with end users yet (with the exception of when an end user already knows that he wants to buy a particular domain name)?
Over the past several years, it always seemed that live domain auctions would yield seven figures no matter what. Well, this isn’t really a reality any more. Domain owners are more picky about what they buy in this tight market, and without domain owners continuing to be speculators, it is much more difficult to produce eye popping auction results with domain investors being the primary target audience.
Times are changing, but I don’t think this is a bad thing for our maturing industry.
