Domain Brokers: Make Me an Offer

I received an email from a domain broker I do not know (and have never even heard of before) asking me if a domain name I own is for sale, and if so, what the price is. The broker indicated she was inquiring on behalf of a client who wanted to buy my domain name. My message to her was make an offer and she said she would need to get back to me.

I would imagine a  domain broker working on behalf of a legitimate buyer knows what the buyer’s budget is. Additionally, an experienced broker should know the approximate value of a particular domain name. That information combined should be enough to at least provide a reasonable opening offer. If the budget isn’t commensurate with the domain name’s value, it seems unbelievable that a professional domain broker would take on the project, especially given the fact that the domain name they inquired about is owned by someone that is knowledgeable about the domain space.

If a domain broker isn’t willing to submit an offer right away, it could be an indicator that the broker is on a “fishing trip” trying to find out prices of various domain names without actually having a client interested in a specific domain name. I suppose there isn’t anything wrong with wanting to know prices of domain names, but it’s annoying as a domain owner when a broker indicates they have a buyer interested in a specific domain name only to find out that the interest isn’t real.

Whatever the case is with this broker, I still haven’t heard back with an offer from their client.  In my opinion, if a domain broker is inquiring about a domain name on behalf of a client, they should be ready to make an offer if the domain owner isn’t willing to give a price or price range. It wouldn’t really make sense for a broker to inquire on behalf of a client that isn’t ready to submit an offer.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

16 COMMENTS

  1. Couldn’t agree more Elliot. I’ve been contacted by one particular brokerage firm who I won’t name in regards to LLL domains. They use the ‘client’ angle which gets your interest as you think perhaps an end user is involved but then go on to make a derisory offer way below reseller price. An immediate flag which tells you they shouldn’t be in this industry, let alone consider themselves ‘professionals’.

  2. “My message to her was make an offer and she said she would need to get back to me.”

    How many back and forth emails will you do before you at least give some type of number to them?

    I have some people that will email 5 or 6 times with another pitch but never offer any number that they are willing to spend. Just curious if you give in at some point and give them a price.

    • I won’t respond to anything else unless they give me a number and it’s a reasonable offer. No sense in dealing with a broker who clearly doesn’t know the value of a domain name. In this case, the domain name is clearly valuable and has had many (insufficient) offers.

  3. She is working on “your” leads..It’s clear 🙂 She is going out to contact your leads to sell them a domain similar to your domain, so she needs your last quotation. It’s simple.

    • Elliot, probably Hugo means that she’s trying to sell to someone else a domain similar to yours, maybe in a different or lower extension, so she’s contacting you to get a quote she can use as a comparison base to price the domain she’s selling.

      Back on main topic, I totally agree with you, we always ask the client to provide us a budget, usually a price range, and based on that, we make an offer to the seller.
      And we try to advise the client about what can be a reasonable/fair offer, based on many factors, on a case-by-case basis.

  4. Could be someone…

    1)With a similar domain looking for help in pricing theirs by seeing what your price point is.
    2)Looking for your price so they can go solicit your domain for sale as a unauthorized broker.

    “Negotiations begin with an offer being made.” Been doing this for 11 years. I don’t submit price quotes make an offer and negotiations begin. My sales landers make it obvious if a domain is for sale so I rarely respond to “is this for sale” or “how much” unless name, email, ip etc… point to end user. Believe me if someone wants a domain you will hear from them.

  5. Actually this is not always the case. We ran up against this last week. We had a buyer offer $500k for a premium Matt is working on for us. This was not enough to buy the domain Matt called him about, but he said he would be happy to entertain other domains we could bring him which he could afford. He went on to describe more specifically his requirements and we found a 2 word super premium domain that exactly matched his parameters more exactly even than the 1 word he was originally offering on. So we had to reach out to the owner of the 2 word domain and ask them if they would be willling to sell. Of course the domain owner (who is a domainer) had the same reaction as you. I had to explain to them the situation and did not want to bother my buyer with their domain if A) it was not for sale or B if it was already beyond my buyer’s budget. Once I made more sense of this to the domain owner I was able to get the answers I needed to even be able to present this domain to the buyer. It’s actually important not to piss off or bother the buyer with stuff stuff that they have no chance at anyway since they are the one with the $500k. I’d suggest next time instead of soliciting an offer try asking why first? The broker should be able to give you a sensible answer.

  6. Elliot. This is the problem with domainers, they have rubber-band pricing where you may want between $100 and 2 million for a domain. Why not just give them a firm price if you have a number in mind? If there was a car dealership run by domainers then there would be no prices on any cars until a full review was done on the potential-buyers assets & income.

  7. Name another product or service other than domain name sellers that require the prospective buyer to make a offer.To give this industry more credence sellers should state their asking price and go from there.

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