Twenty years and 10 months ago, a client of ours registered a domain name. And ten years ago, articles were already being written to lament that all the good domain names were taken. Indeed, ALL four-letter .com domains have been gone for some time. This domain name has 7 letters, but it could also be used for multiple purposes by several large corporations, and it would work internationally. The domain name insurance.com was sold for $35.6 million in 2010, and vacationrentals.com was sold for $35 million in 2007. And while we don’t expect this one to sell for anywhere near this figure, our client has decided the time has come to sell. So how do you negotiate the best price at which to sell a high-value domain?
Appraising a High-Value Domain
The first step is to find a rough estimate of how much your domain is worth. Estibot and Domaining are two widely used services for a free estimate, but in our case they were shockingly low. GoDaddy also offers a domain appraisal service, but its valuation was still less than half the cost of an offer our client received.
Another option is to search for the domain name’s keywords in the Keyword Planning Tool available through Google AdWords; you will need to set up a Google AdWords account to do so. In our case, the keyword planner showed the competition as “low” and suggested a 1-cent bid for the keyword. Ouch.
Domain name value is based on several factors: domain age, length, language, past sales of similar names, availability of other extensions for the same domain (.org, .co, and so on), the number of previous owners, type-in traffic, and number and quality of backlinks/domain score. But the most important factor is the value to a potential buyer. You could have a domain name with 3 characters that’s 20 years old, but if there is no interested buyer, the value is $0.
Using a Broker to Sell a High-Value Domain
If you do have an interested buyer who has provided a bid, the game is on. You have the choice to accept the bid or negotiate for a better one—it is a free country, after all. But if you want to achieve the highest price possible, it’s worth using a domain broker service.
Though the website DN Journal looks like it is 20 years old, it nevertheless does track current domain sales. This year, fly.com was the highest value domain sold this year—$2,890,000 in a privately negotiated sale. Indeed, 9 of the top 100 sales in 2017 were negotiated privately. Uniregistry had the most sales in this top 100 list, with 25 sales ranging from $55,000 to $200,000. Sedo took second place, with 19 sales ranging from $53,000 to $275,000. Namejet and BQDN were the next top sellers, but they sold fewer high-value domains than were negotiated in private sales. And it’s particularly interesting to note that GoDaddy appears on that list only once, so perhaps they’re not the best choice to use if you’re seeking to sell a high-value domain.
Unlike the process of buying a domain, where broker fees can be as little as $69.95 and a 15% commission, the process of selling a domain is significantly more nuanced. Sedo showcases its domain brokers, so it’s a matter of contacting one personally to get started. Uniregistry has you contact them via a single email address and presumably assigns you a broker at their discretion. They do disclose that they charge a flat 15% fee on the website.
If we were selling a high-value domain, we would contact Sedo to check if their brokerage fees were lower or higher than Uniregistry. If they are comparable, we’d feel comfortable using either service.
