Many Sales Discovered or Reported Later

Over the weekend, Rick Schwartz posted a tweet highlighting the fact that domain name sales appear to be seriously down this year vs. last year:

Major sales of #Domains DOWN +/- 50% in 2022 according to @DNJournal

2021…. Well over 100 #DomainNames sold for $100k+. About 9-10 /month.

2022 we’re at 5/month

7-fig sales:
2021 1.25/month
2022 .08/month

Why?
Company Valuations losing 50% +/-
$$ diverted to #NFTs
Mood pic.twitter.com/SFIKVbfjOg

— Rick Schwartz 👑 The DomainKing® 👑 Since 1995 👑 (@DomainKing) May 27, 2022

When 2022 comes to its conclusion, it might turn out that Rick will be correct. We could see a big decrease in domain name sales year over year. In fact, here’s what I shared for the InterNetX market report (left on the cutting room floor): “I suspect we will see a strong first half of 2022 and potentially a slowdown later on in the year.”

As I shared with Rick on Twitter, my year has started out very strong. If the year ended today, I would be very happy with the results. My business is a tiny sliver of the entire aftermarket though, so not much can be inferred from my results.

That being said, looking at the 2022 sales reports on DNJournal and NameBio today might be a bit deceptive. Domain name sales are often reported after the fact and sometimes well after the fact. An example of this is George Kirikos’ report about the $540,000 sale of TradeZero.com. This 2021 sale will likely be retroactively added to NameBio and DNJournal for 2021.

I suspect George and others will discover sales that occur in 2022 for quite some time after the year has ended. People will also retroactively share sales as non-disclosures expire or people discover sales and ask the right person to share the sale price.

Rick will probably be right about a slowdown in the domain name aftermarket in 2022. I think 2021 is going to be a high water mark year for quite some time. There was a lot of cheap money available for people to buy expensive assets like domain names, and it turned out to be a frenetic year for the domain name aftermarket.

I think we are going to see a slowdown this year, but it is difficult to gauge at this point.