I don’t hand register many domain names anymore. I tend to focus my time on finding great domain names that are coming up for auction and making inquiries on domain names that are privately owned.
When I am looking to buy domain names in a certain niche, I like to use DomainTools to do my Whois searches. It’s easy to see who owns a domain name, and the history tool allows me to see the provenance of the domain name. It’s especially valuable when a domain name is privately owned, and I can see an email address that was previously used.
On occasion, I will find an unregistered domain name that I expected to see registered. This is a score for me because if I was looking it up to buy privately, I would certainly value it at more than the registration fee. When a domain name is unregistered, this is the image that is shown on DomainTools. I love seeing this graphic because it usually means I can hand register a domain name I may have bought privately.
Seeing this graphic doesn’t always mean the domain name is available to register, but I’ve found that more often than not, it indicates an unregistered domain name. I love seeing this graphic, and I think it is probably my favorite domain graphic!
Do you know if Domain Tools monitors searches? Which company is the best to use that does not monitor and record your searches?
I know for a fact that if you find a good available unregistered name at the “worlds largest registrar” and don’t register it right away then that name will be registered after about a week. They can say whatever they want but I see this happen on a regular basis.
I would love to be able to check unregistered names and not have my searches recorded.
Can you share a few real examples? I’ve seen people claim this before but haven’t seen solid proof. Perhaps you can lookup some nonsensical letters like iusdyhdhhfhfdyfy.com or even nonsensical terms like bluehoneyhillsfarm.com and then share the results? You’d probably have to mention the names at the time of the look up (privately) so you couldn’t look at a list of newly registered names and claim those were the ones you looked up.
I would imagine this would have very little upside with massive negative PR potential.
It doesn’t benefit me.
@Todd, I saw that going on in Sept. 1995 also. It’s just a coincidence that some other great mind like yours thought of it also.
Nice tip, Elliot. I never noticed the correlation for some reason.
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off-topic but perhaps a future post – converting leads
RS has argued that if the potential buyer’s idea is to only make $500/year off your domain, they aren’t the ideal buyer for a $10k name. But let’s say you know you are dealing with an end user but doing outbound marketing and get a how much inquiry? When you quote a price they either don’t respond or tell you they aren’t interested. Well, perhaps they were only interested at $100 but not at $2500. Is it worth following up or does the domain seller find themselves having to justify why $2500 is not too much to pay for a short, keyword domain relevant to their business?
The issue for me is that with some outbound marketing effort I can get two or three how much inquiries but they just don’t convert. One could argue your price is too high or you aren’t dealing with a truly interested buyer because they started their day not even knowing your domain existed. Anyway, this might be an interesting topic for discussion.
I have to confess Ive found the singular for a non brandable two words dotcom where I currently run a store searching it in domaintools. Of course I registered it and forwarded it to my plural dotcom. The old owner still runs a facebook profile pointing to it with over 5,000 likes.