As the old saying goes, “everything has a price tag“, and while I generally agree, not everything needs to display that tag prominently.
Investing in domain names doesn’t always come with the purpose to resell. Even long term investments can change into becoming selling opportunities, despite the initial plans. Sometimes, plans aren’t quite as concrete to begin with, either.
For that reason, I don’t park all of my domains; some remain in dockets, awaiting their turn for development. During the process, some projects lose their priority and turn stale.
One of these domains became the focus of a gentleman who emailed and called me inquiring about it. The domain had a single page with a logo and a contact email on it.
My initial response was not to respond: I believed that since the domain isn’t marked with a “for sale” sign, maybe by ignoring the inquiry they’d get the message they expected.
The “problem” is, they wanted the domain, and after an initial exchange of emails it became clear that they were willing to pay a reasonable price for it.
Through the exchange, I took a couple of days to decide if I really wanted to sell it.
Short brands are hard to find, and for that reason I remained firm as far as my asking price was concerned. Their initial offer was speculating on the value, citing automated domain evaluation tools. My response on the inaccuracy of these tools indicated that I am quite familiar with the domain market and its intricacies.
By switching to phonecalls things sped up, and the mid four figure sale closed in a day; it took another day for the transaction to complete through EscrowHill.com, that now has a revamped web site and an automated process.
As a gesture of establishing a virtual handshake, I paid the escrow fees, opting for Premium Escrow that took control of the domain name at GoDaddy, and I plan on documenting these steps next week.
If you own domain assets that you aren’t sure if you want to sell or not, chances are that you will – given the right offer and the opportunity to consider it.
Congrats, Theo!
Everybody’s preferences are different, of course. Personally, I like to treat all my domains in the same way, parking them until a developed website is up and running. Even those I bought with no intention of ever selling are positioned to receive purchase inquiries. That way if I’m diagnosed with terminal cancer tomorrow or become too busy with one startup to consider old project ideas, I’ll have a handy record of interested buyers.
But this does involve writing a lot more responses to people. Since I prefer doing personal responses by hand, it is honestly a bit tedious. Pick your poison!
Thanks, Joseph. I think that there’s an inherent resistance not to sell, when you don’t designate such domains as being for sale. The inquiry came from the WHOIS even, not the contact email on the lander. Go figure 😀
hey Theo,
are you gonna share the name? 🙂