The first quarter of the year came to an end yesterday. All in all, the domain aftermarket seems pretty strong from my perspective. I had a solid Q1, recording multiple sales at Afternic, Sedo, Atom.com, and privately. Included in this is four new Lease to Own deals – three via Afternic and one via Atom.
Compared to Q1 of 2024, I had a substantially higher volume of sales. In fact, I sold nearly 3x the total number of domain names in Q1 2024 vs Q1 2025. Notably, just one of these sales was outbound, so it’s not like I was priming the pump to induce a greater number of sales. I am not going to share the largest sale price, but the smallest was $997 (I had a few of those).
The one downside to Q1 is the lack of “home run” deals. I did not sell any high value assets. This isn’t a surprise, but it’s always nice to close large deals. From a financial perspective, closing one large deal can be equal to or greater than all of the other deals put together, so the quarter was still fairly pedestrian from a dollar volume perspective.
I attribute the lack of large deals to the considerable economic uncertainty around the world. There has also be less PE/VC funding for startups of late, and startups with capital are spending less on capex.
All in all, I am happy to see well-priced inventory-quality domain names selling at a pretty strong pace, but I would love to see some larger deals in Q2. I closed a smaller $2k deal via Afternic last night, so I’ve got some momentum as the second quarter begins.
I posted a poll on X to see how others did in Q1. Feel free to vote and share what you saw:
POLL: How was Q1 2025 for your domain investing business?
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) April 1, 2025
It is Great…went to Melbourne Australia for the AO then to the warm beaches of Da Nang and Nha Trang drinking fresh coconut mango rambutan Logan jackfruit durian
Making lots of money….1st class all the way
What do you consider large deal range? Over 10k , 20k, 30k or higher?
Is home run is same as large deal!
Mine was ok, not great, but had a few good sized deals over 10k. And a few on installments. So it was worse than last year, but not terrible. I sold a lot less domains than last year, numerical but had a few bigger sized sales to make up for the numerical drop off.