I would say at least once a month in a negotiation with a prospective buyer or seller, a domain name appraisal is used by the other party to justify an offer or counter my purchase price. The appraisals are almost always from free automated appraisal services like GoDaddy and Estibot. While I think there is some value to those tools, I do think it is quite easy for someone to present them as authoritative when that is not the case.

Nat Cohen, who has sold some of the top domain names and has likely netted more income from domain names than almost everyone else, likely deals with this issue much more than I do given his portfolio size. He recently shared a rebuttal that others might find useful when a prospective buyer mentions the appraised value in a negotiation:

Since the middle of the Summer, things have been running smoothly for my business. While sales have been solid, it remains difficult to find deals on private acquisitions. Auction prices remain higher than I would like, and I have been more actively buying pending delete domain names as a result. For my business, maintaining the status quo is probably the right move, but it is difficult for me.

This afternoon, I went in to my Network Solutions account to unlock a domain name and request an authorization code. While there, I noticed MadeInFlorida.com had the NS1.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM NS2.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM nameservers the company uses when a domain name is expired. I won MadeInFlorida.com in August at NameJet.

I thought perhaps this was my issue and I had not updated the nameservers. It is rare, but sometimes this type of thing happens if I was busy when the name was provisioned to my account. I went to change the nameservers, and I got this error message when I attempted to change the nameservers: “The selected domain name is expired and must be renewed before you can make this change.“