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Fairway.com Acquired by Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation

At the end of January, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation acquired the iconic Home.com domain name from Anything.com for an undisclosed amount of money. Shortly thereafter, the company launched an independent website on Home.com. It looks like Fairway was not satisfied with buying just one exceptional domain name.

Fairway also recently acquired its brand match Fairway.com domain name. If you visit Fairway.com, you are forwarded to the much longer FairwayIndependentMC.com, home of the Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation website. Whois records show that the domain name is now registered at GoDaddy under Whois privacy.

Verisign to Increase Wholesale Price of .com to $8.39

Verisign (NASDAQ ticker symbol: VRSN ) reported its Q4 2020 earnings after the closing bell this afternoon. In the press release announcing its earnings, the company also announced a price hike is coming for .com domain names. The current wholesale rate Verisign charges domain registrars is $7.85/year for .com domain names, and this price will increase to $8.39/year on September 1, 2021.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the press release:

Domain Name Mentors & Educators

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Over the years, I have been asked by quite a few people to be their domain industry mentor. It’s an honor when someone thinks highly enough of me to ask me, although most probably did a quick Google search for “domain investing” and found my website… LOL. Unfortunately, I do not do any mentoring formally or informally.

There are several reasons for why I don’t offer mentoring:

DomainsForSale.com Has One of the Best Portfolios

If you’ve been investing in domain names for any amount of time and did Whois lookups on some of the top domain names, I am sure you’ve come across Anything.com. The company owns top tier domain names like Kitchen.com, Marketing.com, Hip.com, and many other valuable domain names. I would have listed other domain names, like Home.com, but that domain name was recently sold.

The Value of Automated Appraisals

98+% of domain names are meh. They may not all be junk, but they aren’t gems either. My domain portfolio is full of meh-ish domain names, and I bet yours is, too. There’s nothing wrong with meh domain names. They sell every day on every platform and at every domain registrar. Businesses and people use meh domain names when it matches a brand name or when they can’t afford to buy a gem domain name.

Automated appraisals like the GoDaddy appraisal tool or Estibot take a lot of heat from domain investors – and rightfully so in many cases. I get aggravated when a prospective buyer approaches me about one of my gem domain names and says, “well GoDaddy appraises the domain name at $x,” and $x is thousands of dollars lower than the purchase price in a public auction, let alone the price I would consider accepting. Even GoDaddy prices many of its gems well above their appraised value.

Automated appraisals can be annoying and frustrating deal killers.

ROTD Live Auction: Domain Names Now Open for Bidding

As I shared a couple of week ago, Right of the Dot (ROTD) is hosting a live domain name auction with well-known auctioneer Wayne Wheat at the helm. The live portion of the auction will be held on February 25, 2021 at 12:00 PM CST. Bidding will be hosted on the HiBid auction platform.

According to a LinkedIn post by ROTD founder Monte Cahn, the domain names in the auction are now listed on the HiBid platform, and bidding has opened: