information - Expert Exchange: What's Your Average Sales Price for the Past 12 Months? Are Sales up or Down?

Our assembled panel of domain investors and brokers are described as experts thanks in no small part to their ability to continuously produce sales. In our final edition of the current Expert Exchange series, we take a look at the average sales prices of domain names, reported by each expert in response to our questions:

What's your average sales price for the past 12 months? Has this gone up or down compared to the 12 months before that?

Shane Cultra (@Domain Shane), Domain Investor & Publisher of DSAD.com

$5,000. Average is actually much higher because of two large sales. They have gone way up, but only because I haven’t really sold any lower-end names, I had a few good sales, and I liquidated a number of LLLL.com’s from $1,800 to $5,000.

Frank Schilling (@Frank.Schilling), CEO of Uniregistry

$14,000. It's down, and I expect it to lower a bit more as we chase volume deals over magic-bullet big deals. We have a big machine, though, so [we] are more incentivised to sell.

Giuseppe Graziano (@Giuseppe Graziano), CEO of GGRG Domain Brokerage

$189,139 if we consider portfolio transactions as single sales.

Mike Mann (@Mike Mann), Owner of DomainMarket.com

About $2,000. Up from $1,200. The average appraisal is going up, too, around $8,000. There was a flight to quality super-premium .COM once everyone started to realize the new gTLD space is a racket and very few end users know it exists or want to use them in legit commerce.

Nat Cohen (@Telepathy), Owner of Telepathy.com

I don't know, and I don't think it is that relevant because the average can be heavily skewed by one-off big ticket domain sales. Overall, the trend continues that valuations are increasing over time for similar quality domains as businesses better appreciate the benefits that memorable domains deliver and as the growing importance of the Internet economy makes those benefits increasingly valuable.

Joe Styler (@Joe Styler), Domain Investor & Aftermarket Product Manager at GoDaddy

About $2,000, and yes, lower than last year, because last year I had a couple big sales. But recently, I have been focusing more on developing another site, and with kids and a full-time job that I want to give my all to, I get little down time. Luckily, I have been involved in domains for a long time, so I can make quick decisions when needed and I see an opportunity.

Tessa Holcomb, Co-Founder and CEO of Igloo Domain Brokerage

Although total sales were slightly up in the previous 12-month period, our average sale price for brokered transactions ($10k+) is currently higher at $273,013. Igloo’s online marketplace transactions over the last 12-months were roughly the same as the previous period at $3,339.84.

Andrew Rosener (@MediaOptions), CEO of Media Options Domain Brokerage

I honestly don’t know, but for sure, our average sale price increased this year as we had a slew of very large sales. I would say on average we sell 1-2 smaller domains per day ($1,000 to $10,000) and 4-6 large domains per month ($100,000 or more). Of course, there are the mid-range names, but those are less frequent since we target the wholesale market with our newsletter and the end user market with our outbound brokerage.

Morgan Linton (@domainflipper), Publisher of MorganLinton.com & Co-founder of Bold Metrics

I'd say my average sale price is probably in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. I haven't seen this change much in the last 12 months.

Bill Sweetman (@Bill Sweetman), President of Name Ninja

Great topic; however, I would caution anyone to read too much into my numbers, because the size of my transaction data set is much smaller than a seller brokerage or marketplace where they are doing hundreds or thousands of transactions a quarter.

I am going to answer your questions in a slightly different way, which is to say that over the last 24 months, I have not noticed a significant change in acquisition budgets (end user buyers are still spending five, six, and even seven figures on good quality .com domains), but I have noticed that more clients, especially startups, are asking about lease-to-own and payment plan options so that they are not spending their entire budget all at once.

The responses to these questions were gathered several months ago and have been edited for clarity.

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