advice How to price a domain, comparing with Namebio history (with my example)

[kaffekoppen]

Ok, so I have this domain. PrepVR.com. I look on namebio and search for how valuable the prefix prep is in different areas. I see that prepsoccer.com and prepbasketball.com sold for $ 2-3k, some 5-11 years back. I also found many others.

From that i gather:
Prep for sport makes sense and is good, but doesn't guarantee that mine is. I saw some high selling examples of prep+"some tech" in all kinds of ranges.

Then I found prep360.com. It sold for $ 1k 2011. What does that say about my domain name?

To sum up my questions:
1. If i find a very similar name sold for a specific sum, but the sale happened many years back. How do i use that info to price my domain?
2. Which one would you value higher today, 360 or VR?
3. Which one would you value higher in a few years, 360 or VR?

Thank you guys for a wonderful community.
//kaffekoppen

 

[ealfert]

What does "prep" mean in relation to VR? That and why you like the domain will give us valuable information in giving you pricing suggestions.

 

[Michael]

It matters whether you are pricing the domain for wholesale or for retail when looking at comps. If you're pricing it to sell to another domain investor, and the comps you're using are from primarily retail venues (BuyDomains, Sedo, DomainMarket, Uniregistry, Afternic, Moniker, Most Wanted Domains, etc.) then you need to heavily discount them. Conversely if you're negotiating with an end user you probably shouldn't use comps from GoDaddy or NameJet. Venue is very important.

The age of the sale is more important for wholesale pricing, an end user isn't really going to discount a sale from 2012 but give heavy weight to one from 2015 if they are both very close comps. Timing is obviously also more important for liquid domains than for domains that aren't liquid. And in some cases like trend domains, as is the case with your VR example, domains that sold five years ago would likely sell for more today so you might price higher. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for how to look at age, you kind of have to use a common-sense approach and take it on a case-by-case basis.

Another very important thing to consider is sales velocity. If you look up a keyword and you find a single comp for $25k your initial reaction might be to get excited. But when you consider that we've only recorded one sale in two decades of data, your odds of actually making a sale at any price are extremely small, and your odds of getting that high of a price are practically non-existent (for the most part). When you look at sales starting with prep, 77 is a pretty low number, but then when you consider how many were actually just "prep" as the first keyword and not something like "prepaid" there are very, very few. It is not a popular or valuable keyword, even if the second keyword made sense with it you'd likely be waiting a long time to make a sale.

As for how most people search for comps, looking at sales starting with "prep" and then other sales ending with "vr" is all well and good, but for each result you also have to look at the other word and whether or not it made sense and how that might have affected the final sale price. For prep you noticed most of the sales had to do with school or athletics, and for VR most of the other keywords were related to tech or things you would want to see through VR. When you smash together two unrelated words the value isn't some average of the results of your two comps searches, it's basically zero.

Given that prep is not a popular or high-velocity keyword to begin with, and it doesn't make sense (unless I'm missing something) paired with VR, I wouldn't see any value in that name. Look at Google results before buying a domain, who is likely to come knocking at your door within the next few years, or who could you outbound it to? I can't see anyone ever knocking on your door for this domain, and I don't see anyone you could contact that would be interested in the name.

I hope this helps.

 

[kaffekoppen]

What does "prep" mean in relation to VR? ...

It matters whether you are pricing the domain for wholesale or for retail when looking at comps...

First of all thanks guys for the input. And big up to you Michael for sharing your thoughts on this!

Regarding my initial thinking when regging this one:
I'm thinking a short and nice version of prepare for virtual reality. Or just the more general "prep" as in: Preparation/preparing/make ready. There is a lot of hardware and potentially things to set up involved in VR so for me it could either mean "prepare the hardware" or just "be prepared". And it could also be the more "slogany" form where prep could mean, "VR is going huge, Be prepared - PrepVR.com".

**And i think prep is a short for homework in brittish if I'm not totally off here.

With that said though. You guys are experts, and so it's a privilege to get your opinions on it.

I'm still a little bit confused though. We have that name, prep360.com that sold for a decent sum. Isn't that worth something? I'm not exactly sure how to move on from here. I understand that I have to take everything into account, not just one sale, but it would feel very bad to just drop the name.

Some guys I talked to who are in the VR field really liked it, which is weird then...

Well well, I think I'm too tired to elaborate any more on this. Domaining is certainly not easy (feels like my head will explode any minute ^^).

Cheers and thanks again.

 

[briguy]

prepare for virtual reality.

So why not, make a site, add relevant content, build up traffic and then sell it?

Prep 360 https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=E4IBWIHrN6zj8Af_wpfQCg&gws_rd=ssl#q=prep+360
sure looks like "preparing for college" related

Now that domain. prep360(dot)com is a parked page and is for sale..

 

[deez007]

Just my opinion here but when registering a domain that is linked to a particular technology. Its important to keep in mind that the domain will have a "shelf life" you would need to sell the domain during this window because if you wait to long then the technology becomes outdated and the value of the domain will drop. Yes there will still be some interest but the masses with have moved onto the newer technology... like with VR, people are already moving into AR ..

So when you comparing prices from previous namebio sales it's probably a good idea to take this into consideration as well.

Just my 2 cents though..