Knowing when to accept an offer and knowing when to pass is a critical component to investing in domain names. I want to do my best to maximize the revenue from a domain investment, but I do not want to regret passing on an offer.
Nikul Sanghvi shared two question he asks himself when considering whether or not to accept an offer. I always ask myself a version of question two, although I don’t really think about the first one much:
Future Media Architects (FMA) owns a portfolio of exceptional domain name assets, including some two letter .com domain names. The company has long owned AI.com, FM.com, and MR.com. In the last several years, the company has begun selling some of its domain names. More recently, FMA has been using the Saw.com domain name brokerage to manage its portfolio.
Whois records show that FM.com and MR.com have recently been transferred to a China-based domain registrant. Although Whois records are redacted at GoDaddy, it would appear to be the same buyer for both of these domain names. Neither domain name currently resolves to an active website though. I believe the company has been asking $2.5 million USD for FM.com and $1.25 million for MR.com.
I’ve been investing in domain names as a full time career since late 2007. I have bought my fair share of solid domain names, and I have also missed out on some good deals. Some seemed overpriced at the time, but looking back on things now, I wish I had pulled the trigger.
One strategy I try to employ is that I would rather pay a bit more than I think a domain name is worth wholesale rather than risk losing it to a colleague or competitor. If a domain name has such strong resale potential, the few hundred or few thousand dollars more it takes to buy it should not be an obstacle. In practice, it is very hard to do this without spending far too much money because it can be tough to determine where to draw the line.
Andy Booth started a Twitter thread asking people to list the one name that got away. Mine would probably be Values.com, which I previously wrote about Here’s Andy’s thread:
There have been a number of times where I received a direct inquiry or offer on a domain name, and instead of doing a deal directly with my company, the buyer will purchase the domain name via GoDaddy, where I also have it listed for sale. Sometimes the deal is done at a higher (or substantially higher) price than I would have offered had the deal been closed directly with me. Some buyers simply trust the GoDaddy brand name and are willing to pay a premium price to close a deal via GoDaddy.
Pierluigi Buccioli kicked off a discussion on Twitter yesterday, and I commented in response to him:
I track thousands of one word .com domain names using the invaluable DomainTools Monitor Tool. In this morning’s Monitor Alert email, I noticed that Aura.com transferred from Uniregistry to GoDaddy. The domain name had been privately registered at Uniregistry, and it is still registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy.
When I visited Aura.com, I saw that the domain name now resolves to a website for a company called Aura, a device and data protection platform. The domain name previously resolved to a Uniregistry brokerage landing page. A bit of research showed me that Aura had been using AuraCompany.com for its website. Aura.com represents a major upgrade to the company’s web presence, and it allows Aura to stand out from the other companies that have Aura in their brand names.
I reached out to Aura representatives to ask if they could share more information about this domain name upgrade. Lark-Marie Anton, an Aura spokeswoman, shared the following insight with me:
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