The Alliance of American Football (AAF) was a professional football league that played part of a football season in 2019. According to Sports Illustrated, AAF filed for bankruptcy in 2019. The league used the valuable AAF.com domain name for its website while it was operational and for sometime after its bankruptcy. Whois records now show that AAF.com expired, and the domain name is now in pending delete status.
Here’s a screenshot of the current Whois record, courtesy of DomainTools:
I would say at least once a month in a negotiation with a prospective buyer or seller, a domain name appraisal is used by the other party to justify an offer or counter my purchase price. The appraisals are almost always from free automated appraisal services like GoDaddy and Estibot. While I think there is some value to those tools, I do think it is quite easy for someone to present them as authoritative when that is not the case.
Nat Cohen, who has sold some of the top domain names and has likely netted more income from domain names than almost everyone else, likely deals with this issue much more than I do given his portfolio size. He recently shared a rebuttal that others might find useful when a prospective buyer mentions the appraised value in a negotiation:
When I win an auction for a domain name that is registered at a registrar I use on an irregular basis, I tend to transfer the domain name to GoDaddy. Having many registrar accounts with few domain names is a good way to lose track of inventory, and my preferred registrar is GoDaddy. I have run into a bug transferring domain names, and it has not been fixed so I am going to report it here.
I recently won LeadershipAndStrength.com at NameJet. The domain name is registered at Register.com, so I attempted to transfer it to GoDaddy. My initial transfer attempt to GoDaddy failed, so I ensured the domain name was unlocked at Register.com and attempted the transfer again. When I re-initiated the transfer, I encountered an erroneous error message at GoDaddy:
Most domain investors have faced a situation where they received a solid – or perhaps reasonable offer for a domain name that is either lower than the asking price or just not good enough to accept the offer. One strategy I have used in the past is to use the threat of shopping the offer around as a negotiating tactic to try and close a deal. If that tactic doesn’t work, shopping the domain name around might yield a deal.
Let’s say I have an offer of $50,000 on the table for a domain name I have priced at $100,000. Realistically, depending on the name and circumstances, I might be willing to sell the domain name for $75,000. Perhaps I would even sell the domain name for that $50,000 offer if necessary, but I wouldn’t lose sleep if the offer disappeared. In the past, I have told the other party that I will give one more day to consider the price or I will reach out to other companies that might want to buy this domain name.
I was looking at purchasing a domain name listed on DAN.com, and I noticed the platform is now asking buyers if they are willing to let DAN share the sale price publicly. Have a look at the message which is located on the form a buyer needs to fill out after clicking the buy now link on the landing page:
My guess is that this was introduced in mid-2020 when sellers also had the option to keep their sales private at DAN. Notably, this question is specific to DAN publishing sales and not the domain name seller sharing sales information.
There aren’t really any days off for a domain investor that buys and sells domain names for a living. Each day, regardless of whether it is a holiday or not, thousands of domain names come up for auction or completely expire and become available for registration. I was working minimally on New Years Eve and New Years Day, and I thought I would share the final domain name I purchased in 2020 and the first domain name I purchased in 2021:
