OP has PM'd me the domain and the broker and I'll tell you what I can without betraying any confidence. It's all legit. It is a well known industry broker who cannot tell him any details about their client so all research must be done from this end, using educated guesses.
However I am 95% certain I've found who the buyer is; I checked registration and the dot.net of OP's dot.com was regged a day or two before OP received his offer, and the dot.net was regged by a company who would have a very definite interest in the dot.com. This often happens, and has happened a couple times at least to me in the past, where other extensions of one of my domains will suddenly be regged in one day, then soon after I will receive an offer on my dot.com.
OP has a good domain but it is an exact match keyword. It is not the buyer's main interest (they are a solid brand) but domain could be for a side-product launch or a marketing strategy. As an example, I could say it was Vans making an offer on DeodorantInsoles.com, ha ha. Vans is the brand, shoes are their main thing, and deodorant insoles would be some kind of side-product launch or marketing ploy, whatever. The buyer I think is OP's buyer is a solid brand, but not a huge company, their brand is well-established for one product forever, and OP's domain/product is definitely an interest to them but still a side product. Nothing to do with shoes, ha.
I appraised it at a reseller value of in $50 range, as these quality EMK's are dropping every day now since google's fartbombing of EMK's and minisites etc, and an end user value of $300++. I told him that based on my research, if this is indeed the company making the offer, I'd be very happy to receive anywhere between $800 - 1.5K. Also suggested he stick to whatever his counter offer was, in terms of keeping himself an ethical business person (just found out it was $1K).
Told him 1K is a very good price and nothing to be worried about accepting. He has to go with his own wisdom, experience, ethics, but my gut tells me this company would probably not pay more, or much more, than 1K, since it is a side-product and not their main interest. However that is only my educated guess and hindsight is 20/20; perhaps in the future we'll see that they might have paid 10K. This is the constant guess and dilemma of the domainer who has to 'sell a domain blind'.
But I guess all that is moot; they have met his asking price of 1K; all that remains to be seen is whether OP sticks to his word, and buyer pays... or if OP gives in to that attack of sentimental greed we sometimes get when we accept a price and then think 'Oh my God what was I thinking this domain must actually be worth 5 times that price there's no way I'm going to honor that deal because I can get much more later....' etc etc.
Curious to see how this one pans out
