advice How to evaluate a domain name in an auction?

[Southtexas81]

I want to know what do you look for when considering bidding on a name at an auction.

How do you determine if it's valuable?

I keep hearing don't trust the online apprasal tools like Godaddy and Estibot etc. so how do you know its worth?

What is your max bid in % to keep you from not going broke?

What is your investing strategy to stay in the game ?

I also hear most domainers go broke.... I have a hard time understanding this one if you are being careful and selective. If i were to bid on a name everytime that has an estimate value of $5k and I hypothetically never invest more than 20% to try and get it how could you possibly lose money even if it sells in 5 to 10 years? You guys say all the time that buying domains is like buying realestate but without a mortgage but yall act like yall starving to survive.

I'm an investor but i'm new to domaining . After I bought my first premium name for a website at a retail price i quickly became interested on how to make profit from this.

My assessment is that if one were to buy a few names spread out long term for 10% - 20% and hold on to them for 10 + years allowing them to appreciate in value then why not wait 10 to 20 years before selling them?

Just my questions and thoughts.

If i were to drop $10k today on going to the auctions and trying to pick up 20 names with value above 4k or 5k each then I personally would hold on to them for 5 or 10 years and see how they appreciate in value before selling in my opinion but is that a good option for someone who isn't trying to do this for a living but more for a longterm investment.

 

[Kate]

I keep hearing don't trust the online apprasal tools like Godaddy and Estibot etc. so how do you know its worth?

Experience, gut feeling, comparable sales. And the sweet spot is somewhere in the four-figure range. Names have to be really good to sell for five figures or more. So you'd better be conservative when appraising domains.

There's lot of competition nowadays, and it's not rare to see names selling at auction at end user price and even above... so the bid amounts should not always be considered reliable indicators of fair 'wholesale' price.

I also hear most domainers go broke.... I have a hard time understanding this one if you are being careful and selective.

Go broke no, except in the most extreme cases. They are just losing money.
Buying domain names is very easy, selling them is hard. And domain names are illiquid assets. Even good names can take a long time to sell at optimal value (until the right end user comes around, who will pay the right price).

 

[biggie]

how-to-evaluate-a-domain-name-in-an-auction?

if you don't know value or approximate value or potential value,
then you won't know how much to spend or not spend

regardless to whether it's in auction or not

but, if you can figure how many bidders versus closing price, then you can ascertain how many folks would pay up to certain amount, for that particular domain name.

you can always bid on pre-release names that you know will go to auction, with low starting bids of $69 @ namejet.
then you can follow the progression, for names of interest.

so, rather than just going to look at past sales prices and not knowing anything else about that transaction, now you can actually see how many other people had interest.

you can do same, without bidding at other auctions like sedo, which shows number of bidders and high offer, for a given name that's in auction

imo...