Fairway.com Acquired by Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation

At the end of January, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation acquired the iconic Home.com domain name from Anything.com for an undisclosed amount of money. Shortly thereafter, the company launched an independent website on Home.com. It looks like Fairway was not satisfied with buying just one exceptional domain name.

Fairway also recently acquired its brand match Fairway.com domain name. If you visit Fairway.com, you are forwarded to the much longer FairwayIndependentMC.com, home of the Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation website. Whois records show that the domain name is now registered at GoDaddy under Whois privacy.

Verisign to Increase Wholesale Price of .com to $8.39

Verisign (NASDAQ ticker symbol: VRSN ) reported its Q4 2020 earnings after the closing bell this afternoon. In the press release announcing its earnings, the company also announced a price hike is coming for .com domain names. The current wholesale rate Verisign charges domain registrars is $7.85/year for .com domain names, and this price will increase to $8.39/year on September 1, 2021.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the press release:

DomainsForSale.com Has One of the Best Portfolios

If you’ve been investing in domain names for any amount of time and did Whois lookups on some of the top domain names, I am sure you’ve come across Anything.com. The company owns top tier domain names like Kitchen.com, Marketing.com, Hip.com, and many other valuable domain names. I would have listed other domain names, like Home.com, but that domain name was recently sold.

The Value of Automated Appraisals

98+% of domain names are meh. They may not all be junk, but they aren’t gems either. My domain portfolio is full of meh-ish domain names, and I bet yours is, too. There’s nothing wrong with meh domain names. They sell every day on every platform and at every domain registrar. Businesses and people use meh domain names when it matches a brand name or when they can’t afford to buy a gem domain name.

Automated appraisals like the GoDaddy appraisal tool or Estibot take a lot of heat from domain investors – and rightfully so in many cases. I get aggravated when a prospective buyer approaches me about one of my gem domain names and says, “well GoDaddy appraises the domain name at $x,” and $x is thousands of dollars lower than the purchase price in a public auction, let alone the price I would consider accepting. Even GoDaddy prices many of its gems well above their appraised value.

Automated appraisals can be annoying and frustrating deal killers.

10 of the Top Domain Names

Yesterday, I reported on the sale of Home.com to Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. The domain name sale price was not shared by any of the parties, but I would be very surprised if it was not an 8 figure deal. In my opinion, Home.com is one of the top domain names possible, and Fairway has the potential to turn it into an iconic brand name.

Andrew Rosener tweeted about the sale and mentioned that he think it is one of the top three domain names. Someone replied to Andrew to ask what other domain names he thinks are in the top 3 (he said X.com and did not name the other name).

I thought I would give it a go and share what I think are 10 of the top possible domain names there are based solely on intrinsic value. Some of these domain names are actively used and developed, but I think they are top domain names without any of the additional goodwill and/or traffic. These are not listed in any particular order – just as I am thinking of them off the top of my head:

Home.com Sold by Anything.com – Acquired by Fairway

One of the most valuable domain names has changed hands. Home.com has been sold by Anything.com. I noticed the domain name transferred from Tucows to GoDaddy this afternoon. Although the domain name is now registered under GoDaddy’s Domains by Proxy Whois privacy proxy service, the landing page shows that Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation will be launching a website on Home.com in the Spring.