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| Book another big week for the domain business! Talk about perfect harmony. Last week's top seller, Harmony.com, went for $50,000 and this week's leader, BoiseRealEstate.com, chimed in right on key with another 50K! Not that being a penny or two off would have constituted a sour note, but the exact match is a perfect metaphor for how sweet industry music has been this year. |
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This is obviously a company that "gets it" when it comes to understanding the value of generic .com keywords to a business. I spoke with a domain developer who specializes in real estate sites today and he told me he thought BoiseRealEstate.com was an excellent value at this price. He said it wouldn't take long for the buyer to recoup their cash from sales commissions generated through the site. In his area, commissions from a single sale can easily top $25,000. Home prices are lower in Boise but the city, which is Idaho's state capitol, has a population of 185,000 so there are a lot of prospects to work with. Moniker/DomainSysytems' second domain on our new Top Ten, EducationEssentials.com, went to School Specialty Inc., a company based in Greenville, Wisconsin. Over the past couple of weeks we have been talking about the big move Enom's Club Drop has been making in the drop catching market (in fact that is the subject of our current Cover Story). Club Drop has added almost 3 dozen new registrars and the harvest from their enlistment program and Chris Ambler's finely tuned software started coming in this week with the company landing three domains on the big board. Those included #3 AirborneExpress.com at $16,000, #5 B2B.net at $10,200 and #9 iVision.com at $6,000. Club Drop also has a pile of high dollar domains moving through the Pipeline as you'll see a bit later (the Pipeline also features a huge $186,000 sale that should be our chart leader next week). Pool.com matched Club Drop with three Top Ten entries of their own. They claimed #4 with Shareholders.com at $15,500 and also took the 8th and 10th slots. The two other five-figure domains tied for 6th with Biochemist.com and WebsiteDevelopment.com each selling for an even $10,000. Sedo.com booked the Biochemist.com sale while 100DollarDomains.com gets credit for the WebsiteDevelopment.com sale after selling that domain to Ian Andrew at DotcomAgency.com. If he keeps this up, 100DollarDomains owner Arvind Reddy is going to have to find a new name for his site! We'll continue our rundown of the past week's sales activity, but first lets take a look at the complete Top Ten for the week ending Sunday, August 8:
You can see Pool accounted for the other two Top Ten sales we didn't mention in our opening paragraphs, RealVideo.com at $7,600 and FootballClub.com at $5,488. The latter was one of several domains Thunayan K. AL-Ghanim (Elequa) purchased at Pool last week. As always Pool had a pile of additional four-figure sales to report. Those included NorthwestVacations.com at $3,400, WildVacations.com at $3,310 and a pair at $3,300: NationalRealEstate.com and Illicit.com. TropicanaLasVegas.com added $3,200 to the till, followed by GiftClub.com at $3,000 and another pair at $2,650: JYS.com and TrademarkNames.com. A misspell that scores 200 in Overture with the extension, WeigtWatchers.com, wolfed down another $2,350. The parade continued with Discontinue.com at $2,283, DropDead.com at $2,054 and Arrhythmia.com at $2,050. The .net side of the sheet was slim but Beaumont.net fetched $1,979. Sedo's list of big sellers also featured a boatload of domains in that $2,000-$5,000 range. They saw Pauschalreisen.com ("package holidays" in German) go for �4,000 ($4,892), followed by Frankenflirt.de (likely to be a dating site for Germany's Franken region) at �3,250 ($3,975). IGX.com earned �2,900 ($3,547) and Mom101.com added another $3,300. You think Germans don't love their .de's? How about one with two hyphens going for �2,500 ($3,056)! That was Chancen-fuer-alle.de which roughly translates to "everybody should have a shot." Sedo also sold GolfCard.it (Italian country code) for $2,500 and B�rsenbrief.ch (Swiss country code with a term meaning "market letter") for �2,000 ($2,446). K�fer.com (German for "beetle") sold for the same price. Also, though the sale price wasn't high it's worth noting R7.org went for �500 ($611) since we don't see many two-character sales reported. We'll have more on Sedo a bit later since they had the #1 domain on our New TLD chart and 6 of the 7 entries on that list! Afternic.com just missed this week's Top Ten with Pharmaserv.com going for $5,000. They also found a dog lover who was happy to put a leash on EnglishSetters.com for $2,500. Club Drop's completed sales, in addition to their trio on the Big Board, included Legislator.net at $3,200. Some other nice sales that came to our attention were Scamco.com at $4,000 (proud seller Michael Cassidy showed us his Escrow.com receipt), GiftCatalog.com at $3,000 and FreePSP.com at $2,000. GiftCatalog.com was an interesting buy. Chad Wright, who is well-known in domain circles, somehow managed to convince the Target Corporation to sell this excellent domain to him! Chad also told us he has three 5-figure sales in the works and expects to be able to release the names when they clear escrow. .Org fans will be interested in the sale of a nice package of 14 domains (13 of which were .orgs) at DNForum.com. Chris Beach sent all of these to Markus Schnermann of KeywordDomains.com for $5,500: Television.org, Diary.org, Actress.org, Actresses.org, Clicks.org, Clicked.org, Clicking.org, Sold.org, Hoax.org, Hoaxes.org, Definitions.org, Virginity.org and Insulted.com. In the Pipeline: Another big week is shaping up next week and it will take a doozy to top VisitFlorida.com. On August 10, Florida's non-profit tourist marketing agency announced they paid $186,000 to get the domain from a New Jersey entrepreneur. It will fall in the reporting period for next week's column, so that will likely be our next #1. An auction for Kinko.com has ended at Enom's Club Drop at $20,100. They also received high bids of $6,800 on DunnAndBradstreet.com and $6,100 on ProGolfShop.com. Now comes what can sometimes be the hard part - getting bidders to pay their bill! Two of Club Drop's names in last week's Pipeline are still there awaiting payment - EVZ.com and Dynamo.com. Pool has also closed a five-figure auction for EuroPro.com at $14,000. ***** Our Year-To-Date chart gets two new members this week with BoiseRealEstate.com creating a three-way tie for the 21st position and EducationEssentials.com moving into the 37th slot. Here is the complete rundown of big winners so far in 2004:
Sedo remained in control of our new extension chart this week, taking six of seven positions. The big news here is the second highest 3-letter .info sale ever reported to DNJournal. That was SWT.info which went for �2,400 ($2,935) at Sedo. As impressive as that is, it is still several steps behind the all-time 3-letter .info leader, HMS.info (also sold at Sedo), which went for $10,492 earlier this year! SWT could be an abbreviation for sweet and indeed it was a sweet sale, one that will likely add some upward thrust to 3-letter sales in the extension. .Biz claimed the #2 position after Entrepreneurs.biz went for �900 ($1,101), also at Sedo. Though it can be a tough one to spell, that is about as good a match as you'll ever find for the .biz extension. .Info cranked up the volume to take third place with HeavyMetal.info at �750 ($917). .US was also on hand again this week, taking the #4 spot thanks to the $900 sale of HawaiiHomes.us at Afternic. I have to admit that had me doing a quick search to see if any remaining StateName/Homes domains were still available in .us. I found only two still unclaimed, VirginiaHomes.us and KansasHomes.us, so I added those to my collection. Of course, as one of the world's most popular vacation destinations, Hawaii is a special case. Two of the last three spots on our Super 7 went to .info with .biz rounding out that trio. Here are all of the New TLD top sellers reported to us this week:
Sedo closed out the chart with Heller.biz at $611, Bodyline.info at $500 and Esperanto.info at $489. If you're wondering about Esperanto, no that is not something you get at your local coffee shop! It's an artificial language, intended to be universal, devised by Russian Dr. Zamenhof, who adopted the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto'' in publishing his first pamphlet regarding it in 1887. The vocabulary is largely based on words common to the chief European languages and sounds that are unique in any one language are eliminated. To round out the new TLD report I can give you a few of the weekly three-figure sales from my company. Aaron.biz went to Aaron Kluge at DNForum.com for $395 and a package of three .US domains (Teak.us, Scopes.us and Diagnostics.us) was sold at the DomainState.com forum for $500. None of this week's top sellers was high enough to cross the entry threshold for our Year-To-Date New TLD chart (it currently takes $4,000 to get in). So the list of top new extension sales through August 8 remains unchanged from last week:
As always, we welcome all verifiable sales reports from companies, private sellers or individuals with knowledge of an important sale made through any channel. To contribute information and help make this column better, just drop a note to [email protected]. We truly appreciate the industry leading companies represented on our charts who share their sales information with us to help everyone in the business get a handle on current domain values. Individuals like Richard Meyer of the American Marketing Corporation also provide invaluable help by sending us data for these sales reports each week. Every Tuesday we publish the highest reported domain name sales for the previous week. On Monday our contributors send us their sales data for the previous 7 days. We then compile that information and write this report for Tuesday publication to give you the freshest sales report in the industry. We will close with this standard caution. These are not average selling prices - these are top selling domains. One of the biggest impediments to making sales is pricing domains at unrealistic levels. For most of us, pricing domains at the levels achieved on the Top Ten chart will leave us waiting a long time to make a sale! We hope you will use the information presented here as a measuring stick that will help you price your domains at levels that will put more money in your pocket more often! Editor's Note: If you wish to review previous Domain Sales columns, they are available in our Archive.
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Copyright 2004
Domain Name Journal
A Division of
Internet Edge, Inc.