A startup branded as Flip, which has been using the Flip.Lease domain name for its website, recently acquired Caretaker.com and rebranded itself as Caretaker. Caretaker.com had been owned by NetIncome Ventures, the domain investment company founded by Garry Chernoff.
I learned that the purchase price of Caretaker.com was $112,000. Garry’s company had owned this domain name since 2003 after acquiring the domain name in a private transaction.
The startup that bought Caretaker.com was founded in 2016, and it has raised over $7 million in funding, according to its Crunchbase profile. The decision to rebrand came as a result of outgrowing its Flip branding. The company published an article on its blog to discuss why it rebranded from Flip to Caretaker. The article did not mention either its .Lease domain name or the acquisition of its .com domain name.
I couldn’t speculate about whether or not the company would have retained its Flip branding had it been able to buy Flip.com instead. Although Flip.com is not currently used, the domain name is owned by Conde Nast, one of the largest publishing companies in the world. Based on my own inquiries to buy Flip.com over the years, that domain name is substantially more expensive (and valuable).
Once Ron Jackson confirms the $112,000 sale of Caretaker.com, it will rank as one of the top 25 domain name sales of 2020 (to date) in DNJournal. It just beats out Garry’s $100,000 sale of Winemaker.com from earlier this year. I also added the sale to the list of one word .com sales on Embrace.com.
“The decision to rebrand came as a result of outgrowing its Flip branding.”
Translation:
“Nobody had a clue that flip.lease was even a web address”
Meh. I would have instead gone with a nice one-word .com which contained the exact-match “Lease” in it. Say, something along the lines of . . . Leasable .com (not to be confused with the misspelled Leaseable .com). 🙂