No Holiday Break: Domain Buyers Kept Spending Christmas Week

by Ron Jackson

We fully expected to see a big slowdown in domain sales this past week. Many offices closed early so employees and executives could hit the road for the Christmas holidays. However, it looks like a lot of buyers stayed close to home, or at least close to their computers, so they could keep entering purchase orders. While we didn't see the depth of activity we usually do there was no shortage of significant sales, including 6 in the five-figure range.

When it comes to sheer numbers of high end sales, no one has been able to keep pace with Sedo.com in recent weeks. They rocked the house again this week, running off with 5 of the 10 positions on our new list, headed by #2 Partec.com at $24,725. That was the fuse for a hot streak that saw Sedo take four positions in a row, including #3 SML.com at $18,000 and #4 GoToSpain.com at $10,212. They also tied for 5th with GoYellow.com at $10,000. Sedo CEO Matt Bentley took a quick Christmas trip to San Diego to catch some sunshine, but he was back at his desk in snowy Boston Monday morning tallying up this latest round of impressive sales. It's hard to stay away when buyers are beating on the door! �

Afternic.com also earned a share of that 5th position after selling Vessel.com for $10,000. That helped .com pull off a rare sweep of the entire Top Ten this week! Let's take a look at the complete list of big winners, then we'll continue our rundown of the past week's best sales:

As you can see above, Sedo wrapped up their quintet of top sellers with #7 Wellbox.com at $8,690. Last week country code TLD's took 3 of the top 4 spots on our chart. They were absent from the Big Board this week, but Sedo still sold several for very respectable prices. EAY.de (German country code) went for� 4,000 Euros�($5,447), InvestorGuide.co.uk attracted 2,800 Euros�($3,802) and another 3-letter .de, STM.de, followed at 2,000 Euros�($2,716). Sedo's other .com sales included Yoonoo.com at $4,700, Dispo.com at $4,000 and 247Music.com at $3,000. They also collected 1,999 Euros�($2,715) for RentenPortal.com ("retirement portal" in German) and $2,000 for iForgive.com.

The hit list at SnapNames was also a long one, with Seto.com at $6,050 and SaintThomas.com at $6,005 leading the way. A pair of nice automotive domains also crossed the finish line in impressive fashion. SUVAccessories.com delivered $5,650 and 4By4.com hauled in $4,544. Futur.com was also a winner at $4,877. The best .net was a 3-letter domain, ATP.net at $1,510.

Back at Enom's Club Drop, Tierras.com sold for $4,307, DebtManagment.com tallied $3,507 and Pusey.com cracked the 2K mark at $2,207. Afternic added to their bottom line with CellPhoneNumbers.com at $3,888 and Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com provided some Christmas cheer with PartyGin.com at $3,500. By the way, I will be a guest on Moniker CEO Monte Cahn's new internet radio show tomorrow night (Wed. Dec. 29) at 7pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time (2400 GMT). The one-hour program Domain Masters can be heard on WebmasterRadio.fm every Wednesday evening. Cahn also invites you to log in to the site's Lounge chat area during the program. �

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Our Year To Date chart remains unchanged this week. This is the final column for 2004, so below you have all of the reported sales ranging from $2.75 million down to $28,000 this year. Next week we plan to feature an expanded edition of this chart that will give you an even more detailed list of the year's big winners.

New TLD Section

As we noted in our mainstream section, there were some good sales this holiday week though the overall number of transactions was lighter, as could be expected at this time of year. The same holds true for the new extensions. We only had 6 notable sales reported so positions 7 & 8 on our New TLD chart are vacant this week. The leader was SOSNow.info which fetched an even $2,000 at Afternic.com. Three of the remaining five chart entries were from my own sales list. I sent #2 FAF.info to an Austrian company for $750 and a nice set of twins, Lasertag.biz and LaserTag.us, to a U.S. company, collecting $1,200 for the pair.�

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.