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registrars Broker not presenting offers to owner

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Arfy

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Hi All!

I wanted to get your intelligent thoughts on this particular event that occurred as I personally found the broker's response irresponsible and detrimental for the buyer.

I found a nice domain name that I wanted to buy as an investment and to resell in the future. it was a LLL.com with a slang meaning but not a dictionary meaning and no specific end user. The BIN for this domain was $75k and was listed at a well known registrar. The domain previously sold more than once for not more than the bottom of the 5 figure range and I opened up with a $15K offer which was on par with the original purchase price (not very long ago).

The broker's response was that he is not willing to present the offer at all to the owner. Do you think this is the right way to approach a deal? This was my opening offer, surely the owner should be notified in case he wants to make a counter offer or if he is even willing to accept! Not telling the owner anything seems the wrong way to do business and as a buyer it put me off more than anything as the response was abrupt and made me feel that my next offer would not be sufficient either and I therefore stopped make further offers. I understand he is trying to stop time wasters but an opening offer of 20% of the asking price and on par to the original acquisition price doesn't sound like time wasting to me. If I had a domain on for $1k buy it now and someone offered me $200 I would want the chance to counter with $800 and maybe the buyer will counter with $500 and we meet at $675. Telling the buyer to get lost in the first instance is bad customer service.

I asked the broker to present the offer so I could at least judge what the owners response would be and he simply replied that "we have a different understanding of how the domain market works" and just cut off the conversation! I found that extremely arrogant and condescending. The owner will never know that I made an offer or that I would have gone higher than this most probably to a price that he would have accepted. I don't think I will ever sell my domains through this broker after this as I may never hear of offers that have been made to me!

What are your thoughts?
 
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It came directly from the broker so it's not the end user. It shows the brokers name and photo too
At one point of time, I evidenced the similar situation when a friend of mine (sort of a lawyer / dentist / etc, meaning not an IT guy) inquired somewhere about some domain for his small business. He inquired himself first, received far from professional response from some "broker", and so asked me to step in :) I reviewed the negotiations on his laptop and it was Uniregistry messaging. On another end it was not a real broker hired by Uni. A diferent style. The "brokers" name was somebody I never dealt with as a domainer. And there were a couple of buttons inside the inquiry suggesting to "send a message to seller" or "contact Uniregistry support" - also an indication of self-proclaimed broker.
 
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I worked with many DNS brokers, I believe are the same as Uniregistry Brokers (correct me if I am wrong) and they were always at the high level of good behaviour. I could always read emails between buyer and broker. They always presented any offer to me, even offers under the floor price.
 
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Uni brokers may be a pain, but from my perspective it is very clear that the owner doesn't want to deal with domainers presenting floor price offers, only end users.
 
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I really don't like the brokers behavior
who ever that is

low ball offers for a domain are common
and its part of the business
to find what the real sales price can be
 
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Why use a broker?
They are playing hard to get.
A bunch of LLL.com owners can agree not to sell anything below a certain range, and after a few fake but verifiable sales make it industry standard. While you can't sell your LLL for mid-5 figures, they can sell theirs for mid 4 figures easily at forums, because they determine the standards. Why break standards and lose profits, while their domains are already liquid enough. Sit on them forever, They are cash in the bank.

Btw, I'm not against this type of speculation. I suspect this thing is happening elsewhere in domain industry as well, so I bring such a possibility into consideration.
 
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I no longer bother enquiring about purchasing domains at Uniregistry. It's really geared up for massive end user sales.
 
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This might explain why Uniregistry brokers act like douchebags ))

 
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We all want LLL for cheap and your still low balling.
 
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Have you considered that the buyer might have set a minimum price and you may not be meeting that? I’m not sure about Uniregistry but I know you can do that with Afternic so you don’t get bothered by offers that don’t meet your threshold.

Good point, I have had clients who said my ask is $50,000 don't bring me $5,000 offers I won't counter. I don't think it's the best way to do business because you never know what could happen. But more than one domainer over the last 20 years has quoted the old Linda Evangelista line:

I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. Sometimes making the amount $100,000.
 
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GAB.com for $220K just about shows why this bid was ignored.
 
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GAB.com for $220K just about shows why this bid was ignored.
Totally different domain mate. You can't compare car.com with ieo.com for example
 
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Totally different domain mate. You can't compare car.com with ieo.com for example

I disagree. In case of LLL .com anything may happen, some investors buy and make just "few grand" to make a profit and they move to another domain (this is your chance to buy LLL .com for reseller's price), but some investors would rather wait years to find the right buyer for the right price (this is the case of domain you have chosen to invest into) IMO.
 
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Uniregistry brokers come in all flavor,
i tried to acquire a good domain,
and it was a similar response, the weird thing is that 18months later, their brokers are still sending a reminder to restart the discussion with always the same minimum offer(high five figure for a 2 word french domain WTF)

some other brokers are more flexible, and it seem that after some time they switch broker per domain.
you can always submit a support ticket to uniregistry as feedback, you may get someone else as a broker

and all the speculations above are useless until the owner see your best offer,
some broker are deal killer,
maybe the owner need cash and the broker can't know that for sure
 
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Uniregistry brokers come in all flavor,
i tried to acquire a good domain,
and it was a similar response, the weird thing is that 18months later, their brokers are still sending a reminder to restart the discussion with always the same minimum offer(high five figure for a 2 word french domain WTF)

some other brokers are more flexible, and it seem that after some time they switch broker per domain.
you can always submit a support ticket to uniregistry as feedback, you may get someone else as a broker

and all the speculations above are useless until the owner see your best offer,
some broker are deal killer,
maybe the owner need cash and the broker can't know that for sure

I couldn't agree more!
 
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Totally different domain mate. You can't compare car.com with ieo.com for example

I understand what you're saying but 'gab' is a pronounceable slang term. There seems to be some alignment based on your original post.

Either way I'm not a fan of Uniregistry brokers.
 
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I understand what you're saying but 'gab' is a pronounceable slang term. There seems to be some alignment based on your original post.

Either way I'm not a fan of Uniregistry brokers.

I don't know what "gab" means in slang, but gab.ai is a social platform similar to twitter, allegedly for and by alt-right. It is alexa 9800 site, so gab.com becomes really valuable automatically.

I assumed they bought it, but apparently another social platform went for it (could be Russian).
 
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If you made an offer of 50k to a real estate agent for a home listed at 250k would you really expect them to take you seriously?
 
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Uniregistry brokers come in all flavor,

I can confirm this because you can see the written messages they send clients. Often if you set a high minimum offer, you can see they don't actually tell the client that or the amount, they just say the owner has asked for serious offers to start discussion.

Maybe they think stating a high floor price would scare people away? They do seem to have stock phrases and approaches they use, but some do clearly say what the minimum offer is in their messages.

Can you make an offer for the domain via Uniregtistry make offer page, and does that flag up a minimum? Haven't tried that but have seen brokers send clients to that page to make a real offer.
 
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I can confirm this because you can see the written messages they send clients. Often if you set a high minimum offer, you can see they don't actually tell the client that or the amount, they just say the owner has asked for serious offers to start discussion.

Maybe they think stating a high floor price would scare people away? They do seem to have stock phrases and approaches they use, but some do clearly say what the minimum offer is in their messages.

Can you make an offer for the domain via Uniregtistry make offer page, and does that flag up a minimum? Haven't tried that but have seen brokers send clients to that page to make a real offer.

for the domain that i really wanted at the time, i made a 2000$ offer,
but they told me that i need a much larger offer, and quoted a ridiculous price for a 2 word french keyword
they pretended that they received other offers,
but i doubt that, because they never stooped sending emails trying to restart the negotiation,
even when i told them that i moved with another domain for this project

and my offer was off the table as soon as i acquired another domain for this project
 
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That's an interesting one .
Could you please share what this 2 word domain was ?
That could help as i'm currently sitting on a super common 1 French word domain.
 
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If only I could plant Uni brokers in my garden.
They would make perfect scarecrows :-P
 
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