$706,850 Sale of Refinance.com at Moniker Caps MONSTER Domain Sales Week

by Ron Jackson
  

While the overall market was smoking, so were a couple of popular sales venues. Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com in particular enjoyed a week for the ages, having a hand in five of the first six sales on our new Top Ten chart including all three of the six-figure deals! 

Sedo.com followed up by taking just about everything else that wasn't nailed down, claiming four slots on the Big Board plus a quartet of five-figure sales that finished just off the chart. Sedo CEO Matthew Bentley also told us his company had two other sales totaling over $200,000 that could not be released due to non-disclosure agreements.

Among all sales reported so far in 2005, this week's #1 Refinance.com ranks behind only Property.com and Website.com (sold for $750,000 each)...and hold onto your hats, we expect the year's first 7-figure sale to be released soon, perhaps as early as next week. In addition to handling the escrow arrangements for Refinance.com, Moniker.com staged the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East auction where #2 Consulting.com sold for $181,000. The buyers, iREIT.com, took control of the domain this week, adding to their star-studded roster of elite names.

Moniker/Domain Systems also produced #3 Erickson.com at $101,200 and Medicine.org which tied for 4th at $80,000. Medicine.org becomes the highest publicly reported .org sale since we started tracking the market in October 2003, eclipsing previous leader Lottery.org ($66,667). Medicine.org goes to Eric Shannon's LatPro.com with Markus Schnermann of KeywordDomains.com on the selling end of the transaction. As just one more example of how fast the market is progressing, Schnermann had acquired Medicine.org just one year ago in a Pool.com auction for $10,503.

Publicidad.com ("advertising" in Spanish) shares the #4 slot with Medicine.org after going for $80,000 at Sedo. The buyer was Paraguay's Chris Chena (subject of our July Cover Story) who added Publicidad.com to his portfolio of premier Spanish .coms . Chena told us he will use the domain (which gets hundreds of unique visitors daily) as the advertising channel for his rapidly expanding Spanish network. 

Moniker's fifth entry on the leaderboard, #6 NetCash.com checked in at a very healthy $75,800. Sedo would have swept the rest of the chart if it weren't for KuwaitNET's sale of 74.com, the #9 domain at $17,500. We have a LOT more ground to cover, but first let's take a look at the complete leader board for the week ending November 6:

As you can see above, Sedo racked up four Top Ten trophies and took three of the final four positions.  #7 Counter.de (German country code) went for �40,000 ($47,123). #8 RealTone.com rang up �15,000 ($17,671) and #10 RapidAdvance closed out the chart at $16,000. That's a nice week's work right there but it was just the start of the story for Sedo. They had four more five-figure sales that were just off the chart, led by AZ.tv at $15,000. Xpass.com pitched in another $12,500, HTML.de delivered �10,208 ($12,026) and Inventus.com contributed $10,000.

SnapNames.com, Afternic.com and Accelerate.co.uk also notched five-figure sales this week. JobStore.co.uk went for $11,000 at Accelerate, SupportServices.com sold for $10,500 at SnapNames and LatinCupid.com touched Afternic's heart with $10,000. 

SnapNames posted a huge list of winners this week with RetirementIncome.com ($8,588), FlightPlanner.com ($7,290) and AutoRepo.com ($6,388) among those racking up strong numbers. DoublePlay.com turned $6,000, BeadedJewelry.com brought $5,600 and UTurn.com got a $5,300 ticket. OnlineQuiz.com scored $5,100, WebGraphic.com drew $5,088 and IPIN.com secured $5,001. 

HauteDog.com ($4,400) and HotLesbianSex.com ($4,200) also steamed up the windows at SnapNames. Here is a look at some of the other nuggets taken from the Snap goldmine this week:

Back at Sedo, country code domains kept the cash register ringing. Live.sg (Singapore's extension) deposited $8,000, FinanceJobs.co.uk fetched $5,000 and Web.gg gathered �2,500 ($2,945). .gg is the extension for Guernsey and this is the first one from that ccTLD to appear in our weekly report. Vogelgrippe.ws (German for "bird flu") went for �1,000 ($1,178) and 3000.in added $550.

In the mainstream extensions, Sedo raked in $7,000 each from PokerForums.net and 6F.com and another $5,000 from Nanomask.com. Datacatch.com caught $4,450, VintageAuto.com drove off with $4,000 and GaySaunas.com soaked up $3,679. In a rare .name sale, Live.name landed �2,000 ($2,356).

At Afternic, Tweaks.com fine-tuned $7,400, Law4Biz.com bagged $4,900 and InkReplacement.com provided a $4,500 refill. StandStrong.com commanded $3,500, TheBackyardStore.com and NetSlots.com each hit $2,500 jackpots and TheApartmentSpecialists.com moved at $2,000.

The rest of those domains we have been tracking from the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East auction came out of escrow this week. TopStocks.com tendered $8,000, CarsTrader.com and FRW.com went for $6,000 each, FantasyPlayers.com rolled up $5,500 and VideoGuides.com tuned in $4,000.

At Enom's Club Drop, HeartThrob.com attracted $6,100 while GameRivals.com and USAJudo.com threw in $1,600 each. At Pool.com, BabyBoyClothes.com buttoned up $1,850 while MitreSaws.com and Pastafagioli.com ladled out $1,750 each. VIB.net booked $1,660 and MiamiModel.com struck a $1,500 pose.

Elsewhere, NameMogul.com acquired LiveOnCam.com from BuyDomains.com on behalf of a client who paid $7,000 to land the name. Also at BuyDomains, Anunt Patel of UglyPeople.com bought RichMen.com for $4,000. In other transactions, DotcomDepot.com sold WellnessCoalition.com for $2,944 and Rob Freeman parted with PBMA.com for $2,000.

****

Our Year To Date Top 60 club gets six new members, making this truly a banner week. Two of those domains crashed the top ten, with Refinance.com almost unseating the current leaders from the top of the chart. The entry level for this list rose to $55,000. Here is a look at the 2005 YTD leader board through Nov. 6: 

New TLD Section

.Biz has been watching from the sidelines while .Info and .US slugged it out in recent weeks, but this time around biz backers have one of their boys back at the top of the chart. Dave.biz does the honors after going for �1,750 ($2,062) at Sedo. .US climbed back into the ring to sweep the next three positions, with all of those cracking the four figure mark.

The American extension's winners were #2 BabyShower.us, sold for $1,700 at Sedo, #3 PumpkinSeed.us, which spit out �875 ($1,031), also at Sedo, and #4 Seasoning.us, sold by PPCIncome.com for $1,000 to the Ohio company that has been cornering food related domains in .US for weeks now.

.Info missed the top half of the chart this week, but ruled the second half of the list by sweeping the final four positions. That run included #5 SteelBuilder.info, sold at Sedo (a venue that accounted for 5 of the 8 charted sales) for $799 and #6 FreeGolf.info, sold by TheNameStore.com for $699. Here is a look at the complete New TLD leader board for the week ending Nov. 6:

Two more .infos anchored the chart, #7 Jackson.info which I picked up in a TDNAM auction for $472 and Albums.info which went for just �200 ($236) at Sedo. Seeing albums.info go so low really makes me feel old! Having once owned a record store and been a serious record collector I used to have thousands of vinyl albums in my home library. Then CDs came along and made the old albums obsolete. A word that once defined a billion dollar category in the music industry has been reduced to peanuts and undoubtedly brought the little it did only because of the continuing interest in photo albums (though technology will do away with those as well one day)!

None of this week's domains were able to crack our New TLD Year-To-Date Top 50 chart where the entry level is currently just under $3,000. Here are 2005's highest reported new extension sales through Nov. 6:

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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