Contacted by previous owner

[DomainDepot]

I recently bought an expired domain. I was contacted by the previous with the following message (see below). Would be curious to hear other people's thoughts on how to proceed. I have no bad faith/intent with the name, but I am also not in the domain game as a charity. Thank you for your thoughts!

DomainDepot


Email I received:

I am the previous owner of the domain (domain removed) and it had been my business domain for quite some time.

I was unable to renew the domain due to fraud on my bank account which caused me to lose money and have to change my bank and credit cards. This matter was cleared up this week and I am finally able to conduct business again.

I was made aware that you were able to purchase the domain yesterday and I would like to know if you would be willing to sell it back to me. I would be willing to reimburse you the registration fees and also pay you the amount that I would've paid to reconnect the domain.

Thank you in advance for your time,
Name Removed

 

[Kate]

Apparently many registrants are quite naive, thinking they can just let a domain expire and buy it back, like nobody will notice. They don't realize droplists are published for the whole world to see and hundreds of vultures (that is us) are waiting to snag those names. Even crap names can be desirable for the residual traffic.
If only people would realize what's going on and the shenanigans in this industry.

 

[Nick]

The tone of this guy is quite the opposite of what I had to deal with this week. Had the email to me sounded more like this one, I'd most likely have helped the guy out after verifying his story. By "helped", I don't mean give for free, but certainly taken his story into consideration when giving a price, like you seem to have done.

 

[MR Harrist]

if the domain non keywords, or hard to sell, just ask him $299, and I am sure its fair enough! but if the domain name have keywords and have huge potential fo $xx,xxx! if I were you I will give link to godaddy landing page and ask him to do BIN! because I am sure that person is domainer or maybe broker!

since you don;t mention the domain, name! maybe $299.

 

[DomainDepot]

Thanks for all the great responses:

Update:
Previous owner has agree to 90 day timeframe for $500 price. I told him I would point the name to his page in the interim while he scrambles to figure things out. I think it is a reasonable compromise. Like some of the members here have stated, his tone has made me sympathize a bit. What if something similar happened to me? If he had acted like a jerk then I would probably have responded differently. I can afford to be reasonable in this case and I feel it is warranted.

 

[parkdo]

good way to buy a domain from other owner

 

[johnn]

It happened to me in the past two times.
I sold the names back to them for $50 after checking to make sure they are not Namepros member.
They are small businesses and one of them is a candy store. They send me around 20 lbs. of candies to my house.

Now I have to spend thousand of dollar on medication because I am diabetic now

 

[guilty]

It happened to me in the past two times.
I sold the names back to them for $50 after checking to make sure they are not Namepros member.
They are small businesses and one of them is a candy store. They send me around 20 lbs. of candies to my house.

Now I have to spend thousand of dollar on medication because I am diabetic now

Now you should grab a health insurance domain name and hope that a health insurance company would give you health coverage for 20 years for the domain.