“Reasonable is for LOSERS!”

I don’t always agree with Rick Schwartz when it comes to domain name sales negotiating tactics, but I agree with his thoughts today about inquiries seeking a “reasonable” price to buy a domain name:

I can understand the buyer’s sentiment because everyone wants to pay a reasonable price, but “reasonable” is the enemy of profitable. From my experience, “reasonable” generally means cheap, and for many buyers, that means a very small premium over the cost of the registration fee. They see they can register a domain name for $10 on GoDaddy and they want to pay close to that, totally discounting the value of a good domain name. A domain name may be worth $10,000, but to them, a “reasonable” price is $100. In fact, some people think this is generous!

When it comes to one of a kind domain names that are getting more expensive and challenging to replace, reasonable is not sensible for a domain investor. In fact, many domain investors are paying what would seem to be unreasonable prices to buy domain names right now.

Depending on the domain name and the opening offer (if the prospective buyer made one), I generally reply to these inquiries as long as they are not abusive. Typically, I will just send the price with very little commentary. I have found that educating those buyers is not worth the time.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

12 COMMENTS

  1. Rick – based on the picture associated with this post – you also need some OZZY glasses 🙂
    “reasonable” – means you can do one of the following:
    #1) do the right thing – which is respond “What does reasonable mean to you”
    #2) do the wrong thing – which is respond “Our reasonable price is (some big number)”
    #3) do nothing as rick suggests

    #3 keeps them from telling you what a genius they are – sometimes with crazy threats

    • Yes to #3. I feel like responding to them about their idea of reasonable often leads to a confrontational situation. Confrontation about what is considered reasonable almost never leads to a deal and is a waste of time and energy.

  2. He is right. They begin with ,I am interested in buying this name, Is it for sale?The lander also answered that and there is a make an offer .I reply and ignore when they say reasonable, the serious ones will reply by increasing their offers to a more reasonable range before I respond back . Easy to filter out the jokers or those who don’t understand the value of a domain name .

    A lot of them are time wasters .

  3. I think that the intention of the reasonable thing between seller and buyer is that the first give a fair and moderate price that the buyer must see that it is not expensive.

  4. Fantastic. He is James Bond of domainers. Konstantinos Zournas is Jason Bourne. Mike Mann is Ethan Hunt. Andrew Allemann is Prof John Nash. Rob Monster is Frank Lucas + Dr Indiana Jones. Ron Jackson is James Cameron. Kassey Lee is The Keymaker. Elliott Silver is John Crowley . Kate Buckley is Beatrix Kiddo. And I am the Chris Gardner.

    • If you send them there it is anchoring them on the lowest prices on the sales report, likely auction sales/wholesale prices. If never had a good response from a buyer after pointing them to dnjournal. Might be better to avoid the “comparable sales” stuff altogether.

  5. I once had Comedy Central ask me for a humane price. At first I thought, its CC so it could be a joke. Turns out it wasn’t so the multi billion dollar parent company Viacom was asking for my compassion and I just couldn;t wrap my head around that. The story ends with them going with their #2 choice and the show failing inside 2 years. I made sure when responding to their first inquiry to let them know that anything they put this little effort or resources into was doomed to fail, I was right.

    • So very true! We all know that not all “premium domains” are not premium just like all “reasonable prices” are not so reasonable.

      I’ve had a lot of success with folks who start out with the reasonable price line. It shows they really want it, and usually means that they are stretching and may go above what they want to pay – and until you have a number, you don’t know if it’s worth considering.

      For Schwartz to say that he only wants unreasonable prices is a bit crappy. People can have two different reasonable prices for the same asset and both can be valid and reasonable if they can be justified.

      Schwartz’s tweets suggest he doesn’t really care about justifying the prices and that’s definitely up to him.

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