Over the past couple of weeks, Rick Latona’s team at Latonas.com has had a series of one day domain auctions, with all but two auctions having all domain names listed at $1.00 reserve prices. When a seller opts to list 50+ domain names in a single auction with basically no reserve price, they must have confidence in the venue. If interested buyers aren’t present or a technical glitch prevents people from bidding, it can end in disaster for the seller.
So far, the people who have held auctions at Latonas.com – and Latona’s company itself – have all made out fairly well with their auctions, netting well over a quarter of a million in sales. Here are the auction totals so far:
- House Auction: $132k
- House Auction: $19k
- Richard Whitney auction: $46k
- .MX auction: $3k
- $1,000 House auction: $93k
- Edwin Hayward auction: $27k
- Eddie Sherman auction: $8.5k
I think Snapnames is the only other auction venue that allows private domain investors to hold personal auctions on its own proprietary platform (Bido may, although I am not 100% positive). The major difference though is that Latonas.com only has one auction during that day, so all of the marketing focus is on the one single auction.
Today, Domain Capital is holding an auction, with the prize domain name being Dolares.com (meaning dollars in Spanish). The auction already has over 40 bids and a price of $2,000 with just a few hours remaining. There are a few other good names in the auction, but with a fairly small auction like this, the best name stands out even more for people to bid.
Will Rick be able to build off of this great momentum? Only time will tell, but there are a number of companies out there with sizable portfolios who would love to drive 5 figures in revenue in a single day, and there are plenty of people out there looking for good deals to keep the sales prices honest.
Thanks, Elliot.
I agree and we need more liquidity in the domain market! I like the idea of personal auctions at the venue, I think it will keep the current format alive for a while. Keep up the good work Rick.
@ Rick
Who should people contact if they want to have their own auction run? What are the requirements for this?
Speaking from experience, so far I have not encountered any issues with the auctions from Rick’s platform, I have so far won three domains there….my only grief (small one at that) is that they only accept payments via checks and paypal, I would have taken part in a lot more auctions if I could have paid by C/C!.
Spot on post Elliot – Rick has some nice momentum going.
Definitely a classy (and smart move) testing the platform with his own domains when he launched.
Owners are just dumping, especially their long-tail names.
There are far too many auctions right now. It’s like a dumping of foreclosed homes. Values are dropping, especially with long-tail domains, and owners are just getting rid of them.
Save your money. Buy a strong .com and avoid these gimmicky auctions
@ dcmike
There have been a number of strong .com names in these auctions.
eventually this will end up like bido,
good to start with then, just selling junk for the sake of it.
Theres only so many good names that latonas can sell at auction,
I think if they have it spread out,
Day 1: .eu
Day 2: Real estate keywords
Day 3: .us
Day 4: Golf niche
Day 5: .net
and so on,
mix it up alittle,
Instead of portoflios.
Variety is nice, but targgeted is better.
Maybee they have this planned ?
I never read up yet.
@ Steve
My take is that there are probably 40-50 people and companies who have enough good names that they are selling that this could happen. If Rick does 2 a week, that’s half the year. In addition, there are people/companies who have enough good names ($500-5,000 range) that would want to do 3-4 auctions over a period of time. This analysis is limited to people I know and doesn’t include markets like ccTLD or IDN because I don’t know enough investors to know if that’s feasible there.
Knowing Rick though, once this well is dry, he will have another unique idea to drum up business. IMO, everyone wins in this case unless someone has a list of bad names. The more bids and higher prices, the better for Rick and the sellers, and buyers are always looking for deals.
An auctioneers #1 job is to make sure the auction has stuff that is worthy… BIDO doesn’t do their job very well, which is why they are losing money day after day after day. Probably burned $1m+ in private funding on this venture.
The whole social powered next generation platform sounds cool at first, but does it actually work? Does it make cash?? Does it close sales??
NO.. NO… AND NO.
Sooner they realize this the better, but it may just be too late.
My 2c 😉
A lot of the domains went WAY TOO CHEAP.
I bet the owner of PlasticSheeting.net would pay a lot for
PlasticSheeting.com.
(I think the .com went for something like $ 700. ? )
I assume the sellers negotiated a fixed percentage for sales commission. Otherwise, they really took a beating.
Reg. commission – Min. $ 200 or 15%.
if the domain sold for $ 1. or $ 20, the seller owes Rick money.
🙂
The problem with Rick’s platform is that it is time consuming.
He has too much unnecessary bandwidth eaters.
Fancy background, logos, boxes, etc.
Make the pages simplistic so bidders can quickly move through the list and place bids.
I hope the sales platform and concept is successful.
@ Jon – funny. I don’t see in the bidder’s agreement where it specifies Paypal & check over CC: http://www.latonas.com/mainportal.prt?action=buyerterms
I bid on a couple items under the assumption CC is okay.
For what it’s worth, one is: CollateralLoans.net , which closed yesterday at $71.00 I bid twice in the final minutes, until I realized a proxy bid was bidding against me.
CollateralLoans.net was on sale at https://www.snapnames.com/?aff=4306&dom=collateralloans.net for over $3000.00 through the auction, but was taken down today.
It’s due diligence. $71.00 is a small purchase, if I could have won the bid, but it still makes sense to research it.
Alright I won! From the Domain Capital 1 dollar reserve auction headlined by Dolares.com, TaxWithholdings.com! Before Latonas’ launch of the daily auction, I couldn’t claim to own a Latonas auction property . . . not with a $200.00 fee to price off. This might be the only time in history you can win a Latonas auction without investing hundreds.
QUOTE: dcmike77
“Owners are just dumping, especially their long-tail names.
Save your money. Buy a strong .com and avoid these gimmicky auctions”
I agree 110%. There arnt any good values at these auctions. Dont even bother looking. Stay away, stay away!!