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New Owner Pays $26,500 to Take the Wheel at MotorVehicles.com!
After the blockbuster $2.75 million sale of CreditCards.com last week, you
could almost feel the industry step back and let out a deep breath this week.
A sale like that is a tough act to follow! Though we have a trio of new sales
over $20,000 to report, the action was a bit slower overall as buyers and sellers
digested the CreditCards.com news and what effect it might have on market prices.
It doesn't look like the pause will last long as you'll see in our Pipeline section later on. Lots of significant sales are heading toward completion at the kind of healthy prices we've grown used to this year. This week's leaders are nothing to sneeze at either. #1 MotorVehicles.com filled the seller's tank with $26,500 in a deal conducted with the assistance of both DNForum.com and Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com. The domain was listed for sale in a thread at the forum and snapped up almost before the page could be refreshed! The two parties then turned to Monte Cahn's security-conscious site to oversee the actual exchange of funds.
The #2 domain in our new Top Ten is PaintballGun.com, a name that hit a $21,830 bulls eye at Pool.com. That sale was followed closely by a $20,000 deal for Grip.com at GreatDomains. After the top 3, prices on the big board were in the four-figure range and all entries were .coms except for #7 which turned out to be a lucky number for .info. That spot was taken by Minnesota.info after it changed hands for $5,000 in a private transaction. We'll have more on that deal and some other nice new extension geographical domain sales in our New TLD section below.
The balance of our new chart includes three sales at Sedo.com and one each from TopNames.com, Afternic.com and Enom's Club Drop. Here is a look at the complete Top Ten for the week ending Sunday, July 25:
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Sedo hit the Top Ten trifecta this week with Villen.com, Airnergy.com and MatchMind.com. Airnergy.com is interesting because we don't see many made-up names among the weekly top sellers. Such names normally require a lot of branding work and companies tend to coin their own phrases rather than buy them on the aftermarket. Neither Overture (search popularity) nor Marketleap (link popularity) shows any apparent traffic for this name, so it would appear it was purchased for the name appeal alone. TopNames' #4 domain Softworks.com is technically a brandable name as well, but it is one where an immediate meaning springs to mind and it also has built in traffic coming from over 400 established links. The Afternic and Club Drop entries on the big board (SellMyCar.com and BabyStores.com) are the kind of traditional generic terms that tend to produce the best sales.
The list of Sedo's other sales presents the potpourri of extensions we have come to expect from that popular site. Three were .de's (German country code domains), including the misspell googgle.de at €3,000 ($3,615), Heu.de (German for "hay") at €1,800 ($2,169) and HotelStuttgart.de at €1,500 ($1,808). Their other notable .coms were Motorradteile.com (German for "motorcycle parts") at $2,888, PropertyBid.com at $2,488 and ProFormat.com at $2,288. However, the real headturner was the highest .cc sale we have seen to date - SMS.cc at €2,200 ($2,651). .CC is the rarely used country code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
Despite their obscurity, we have noticed more developer interest in strong keywords from some of these small country code extensions in recent months. In fact, I personally sold Wholesale.ws to Bob Mauro this week for $750. Though Bob keeps up with what is happening in the domain business, he is taking an end user view of this domain with plans to develop a wholesale business portal. .WS is the country code for Samoa, but an American company has been marketing it globally in recent years, saying it means "website". Developers like Dan McCullough (airlines.ws and employment.ws) have been successfully building (and reselling) sites on the extension for some time now.
Back at the Pool, we saw PrescriptionConsultation.com go for $3,000, despite its marathon length (28 characters is the domain world equivalent of swimming the English Channel!). This one proves long isn't always wrong as it scores 116 with the extension in Overture (though we shudder to think how much traffic must leak to a hundred different misspellings)! Pool also collected $2,050 for MobilePay.com and found someone to leave a $2,000 tip for CyberWomen.com. No .nets topped the 2K mark this week, but Pool did move Yugoslavia.net at $1,550, Trekking.net for $1,350 and Crib.net at $1,200.
We're starting to see some results from all of those new registrars added by Enom's Club Drop. One cool sale was ChillOut.com at $3,000. WestBengal.com was worth $2,100 and SnackFood.com added a lot more than empty calories, selling for $1,600. ClubDrop has some bigger ones currently in the pipeline.
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Other notables included Afternic's sales of BetSite.com for $4,000 and BuyBritish.com for $2,660 and the $2,200 sale of ServiceClient.com at Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com. Several new TLD domains also went in this range, but we'll save those for our new extension report below.
In the Pipeline: It looks like a powerful week is shaping up for our next report. In two big auctions at Pool, Headstones.com went for $28,000 and HooverDam.com ended at $26,500. If the money arrives those will be among the headliners next week...Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com says they expect to close a $25,000 sale of JetCharter.com in the next few days. They are also wrapping up a $10,400 transaction for 888.org...Afternic has also just about finished an $11,000 deal for DebtCollection.com...At Enom's ClubDrop an auction for B2B.net is scheduled to end July 31. As we went to press July 27, the bidding was already up to $8,300. Another auction for AirborneExpress.com ended at $5,000 and Club Drop is just waiting for payment on that one...Pool is also awaiting a $7,550 payment for MySence.com (6,377 in OT with the extension!) and one for $6,388 from the winner of 800Number.com.
Our Year-To-Date chart remain unchanged this week. MotorVehicles.com just missed crashing the YTD list by $500. Here is the complete rundown of big winners so far in 2004:
This week's New TLD chart has the most even distribution among the three extensions we cover (.info, .biz and .us) that we have seen to date. There are three .infos, two .biz and two .us and each one had at least one four-figure sale. .Info did claim the top two sales, Minnesota.info at $5,000 and VirginIslands.info at $3,000 and both went to the same buyer - Norway's Rune Langhelle. The sellers, partners Bob Connor and Dan Stager, had begun development on the two sites and Langhelle said he would continue what they started. He also has a number of other .info and .biz development projects in the works.
Money seems to burn a hole in Connor's pocket! As soon as he sells one nice property, he is off buying another to develop, as was the case this week when he purchased the #3 domain, Honolulu.us for $2,500 at the DomainState.com forum. Just last week, Connor purchased Fresno.us and Vancouver.us, so he will be a busy new extension developer in the weeks ahead.
A pair of .biz sales at Sedo took the 4th and 5th positions on our new Super 7. Accenture.biz went for $1,500 while DigitalDruck.biz (a German term meaning "digital compression") sold for $977. Here are all of the New TLD top sellers for the past week:
I liked seeing the sale of Sausages.info at Sedo for $750 as I have Sausages.biz. I would like to develop mine, but my waistline would be better off if I kept my mind off that subject! PPC.us, which sold for $702, was one of several high quality 3-letter .US domains that Dan Stager auctioned off this past week in three major domain forums. His other sales included WAV.us at $362 and JPG.us at $330.
In addition to their three chart entries, Sedo sold SoapBoxDerby.info for $600 and Bergland.info ("mountain land" in German) for €450 ($543). Pool sold another .info, Mikrotechnik.info for $380 and I just received a $300 payment for Carey.biz today.
Minnesota.info was strong enough to crack our Year-To-Date New TLD leader's list, tying Woman.info for the 20th position. Here is a look at 2004's top new extension sales through July 25:
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 editor@dnjournal.com.
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.
Source : http://www.dnjournal.com/
