I received a $1,300 offer for a domain name via Afternic broker. The name was listed for sale at Afternic with a $1,999 buy it now price. When I had a look at the landing page, I saw that I had repriced it to $3,999 on DAN.com at some point in the past year. I replied to the broker to let him know I would not accept the offer and that the name had been repriced to $3,999 although I neglected to update it at Afternic. The broker came back a few hours later with the buyer’s new offer: $1,999.
I accepted the offer.
At the time of the opening offer, I mentioned on Twitter that buyers should buy a domain name if they see it listed for a reasonable price because the seller could opt to raise the price if a lower offer is submitted. Making an offer to save a bit of money could backfire if the seller had underpriced the domain name or failed to update the price in a while.
Under some circumstances, I might have held firm at the new $3,999 price I quoted to the broker in order to maximize the deal value. Instead, I agreed to accept the $1,999 offer and sold the domain name.
I bought this particular domain name (which will remain private) for a little bit more than $100 in the early Spring of this year. After the Afternic commission fee of 20%, I will net $1,600, so the total profit is a little less than $1,500. While the $1,500 is nothing to really brag about, this is a nice 15x ROI in a little more than six months.
Most importantly, this is the type of domain name I buy almost every day at auction platforms and venues. It is replaceable inventory for me, and I am happy to move this type of domain name for a 15x return. I can buy 10+ more domain names of the same caliber with the net proceeds from this sale and hopefully continue to replicate.
The other consideration I made is for the Afternic broker. I can imagine it would be difficult for him to have to explain the reason for why the domain name was listed for $1,999 and suddenly was priced at $3,999. Whether the buyer could pay that amount is something I don’t know, but I would have a difficult time agreeing to pay 2x the BIN price for a domain name simply for submitting an offer.
Assuming this was an end user buyer, he or she probably feels some relief that they got the name at the original price, the Afternic broker is probably happy to close a sale and make a commission, and I am content with a nice ROI. All in all, I think it worked out favorably for all parties.
Well done. Good judgement IMHO.
Nicely done. 👍
Agree with your approach, Elliot, I did the same for some buyers as well.
And most importantly Elliot your good name is intact.
Nice ROI Elliot. Did you have an Afternic minimum “make an offer” price on it? If so, would you mind sharing the amount? Was it the $1,300 offer you referenced? Thanks.
Based on memory, I believe it was either $800 or $999. The offer was higher than the minimum.
Thanks. Interesting that the buyer didn’t start with the $800 / 999; instead picking a figure between that and your ask.
Would be interesting to know how often folks take that same “between” approach . . . perhaps you and others could weigh in . . .
I can’t give a good answer on that. I can say the majority of my Afternic deals are BIN sales rather than negotiated.
Interesting. Thanks. Most (50%+) of mine are negotiated.
Congrats on your sale, but the more you mention how much you’re buying names for the more your hurting your future sales and others’ future sales, there’s many of us trying to change this habit of constantly saying how much the domains are bought for….. Especially when buyers don’t know all the expenses, times and other things that go into consideration when buying domains.
If anyone is looking hard enough to find my blog posts, I am sure they would already be following GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, and other venues where the wholesale prices can easily be seen. They would also know about NameBio, which archives all publicly reported sales above $100.
So your current 23 000 followers on twitter are all domainers? Didn’t know our community was so vast. Just saying (and there’s many of us) that find constantly saying acquisitions prices publicly (which no other industry really does) is hurting our industry. No ill will.
Never done any sort of analysis on that, but I hardly ever share acquisition costs (or sale prices).