A friend told me a story about a domain name he sold for quite a bit of money that was later dropped by the buyer. It doesn’t make sense that someone would pay for a domain name in the aftermarket only to let it expire, but it happens, and that’s why you should monitor domain names you sell.
There are many reasons why a domain name might drop after someone pays for it. Perhaps they decided they didn’t want to move forward with their project or the person leading the project no longer works for the company. There are a multitude of reasons for why it could have expired.
I can give you three reasons for why you may want to monitor your domain name sales:
- If you see a domain name expire, you can be nice and let the company know about it. Perhaps they no longer want or need it, and you can get it back cheap rather than risk it going to auction.
- If you don’t want to go above and beyond, you can track a domain name that expired in order to re-acquire it when it becomes available, either at auction or via drop catching.
- If the domain name is used by the buyer, you can use the domain name as an example of why someone would buy a domain name on the aftermarket. It’s always nice to be able to share examples of successful domain name sales.
When I want to monitor a domain name, I use DomainTools’ Domain Monitor tool to do so. I click the monitor button located within the Whois lookup page, and it will alert me if there is any type of status change. Whether the domain name gets transferred, the Whois information changes, a nameserver is updated, the registration status changes…etc. I will receive an email from DomainTools letting me know about the change.
I sold one for nearly 10K and didn’t bother checking on it, it wasn’t until a couple years later I learned the domain expired and another domainer picked it up at auction, after some negotiating I bought it back for $1200,
I remember it was developed for a corporation, I tried pulling up a page on Archive.org but no luck… If I know sooner, naturally I would have notified the owner if the name was nearing or past expiration, it’s just good business.
And if he asked for it back, I’d probably sell it for 1/2 of what he paid me the first time.