Domain brokerage and consultancy GGRG.com has released their latest free quarterly report (.PDF file) breaking down aftermarket sales of "liquid domain names" (short .com domains consisting of all letters (L) or all numbers (N) that are relatively easy to sell at prevailing market prices). The new report (.pdf file), covering the first quarter of 2017, got a huge boost from the inclusion of sales data from Escrow.com for the first time - $16 million worth that triples the size of GGRG's data set when combined with $8 million from ShortNames.com.

The report noted, "For the third consecutive quarter, China was the largest net gainer of liquid domains names by adding almost 7,000 domains, nearly1.2% of the entire liquid market. In contrast, Europe and the U.S. stayed stable, with the rest of the world suffering the largest reduction, losing 10,000 domains.
China keeps leading the numeric domain categories (2N, 3N, 4N and 5N), while the US leads only in the 2L and 3L space with over 50% of the domain registrations."

Those numbers could change drastically over the next few years though. Graziano said that if the current movement trend continues, China will likely own over 50% of the entire liquid market by 2020.

GGRG Founder Giuseppe Graziano

With respect to transaction volume and prices GGRG reported, "the total number of transactions across categories actually decreased by 23.5%, from 5,455 to 4,173. The floor prices stayed stable, but we did evidence a further single digit decrease in the value of 4L and 5N .com domains, namely the most traded categories, losing on average 8% each."

Looking ahead, the GGRG forecast said, "The trend inversion in the development index might suggests that the price of liquid domain might be starting to become attractive again for end users. It is interesting to note that we are not seeing large losses on the floor prices. As predicted in our prior reports, however, we are seeing a decrease in values for the more expensive "Chinese Premium" domains. Especially the 3L .com domains which lost almost 50% from their peak and are now trading at values closer to the "Western Premium" 3L domains."