1. A huge number of wholesale sales are reported. E.g. all the Godaddy sales you keep referencing.
I mentioned this before, but if the majority sales are to other investors then that's indicative of an overvalued asset.
2. ~99% of retail sales are not reported.
I'm not sure whether that number has any merit, but it doesn't change anything because it's sales we don't have access to. We do know that wholesales occur behind the scenes too. In fact, they're very frequent because escrow services are cheaper than aftermarket commissions.
3. At wholesale a domain will sell for a fraction of its retail price because the wholesalers criteria is much broader than a retail buyer.
Yes. But we're talking about a category of wholesales in the three-figures, with expectations to sell in the five figures.
The only way these numbers make any sense is if the domains have a return of investment rate of just over 1% over 10 years. And that's assuming that investors know what they're doing.
4. For a retail buyer with a specific name in mind, other sales data (especially wholesale) has virtually zero impact on their purchase. They either value the name at the asking price or not.
This is not the case as demonstrated by the topic of this thread. Mr. Chase didn't want to spend more than $2,000 on hstf.com, which allegedly is based off an aggregate of wholesales.
5. Just because you don’t understand one niche of domain investing doesn’t mean others aren’t making a fortune in it
That may well be the case. But based off the sales data I have access to I'm not seeing it.
I have no dog in this fight. It makes no difference to me if you understand any of this or not. But hopefully others reading are a little more open minded.
Being open-minded isn't the same thing as blindly accepting what people tell you. In fact it's the opposite of that. I'm looking at the sales aggregates trying to make sense of the numbers and people here are responding with counter-arguments like "Look at this crazy sale! Guess you're wrong huh?!" Seemingly completely ignorant of the concept of outliers.
We can argue about the true value of a domain name all day. Ultimately, the seller and buyer have to agree on a value to complete the transaction. Sometimes, there is no logic behind it, just because the buyer or the seller has an emotional attachment to the name.
You agree on a price, which is the value at the time of the purchase, but not necessarily the value after the purchase. Other than that what you're saying is true. The only caveat here is that I'm only looking for ones with logic behind them, i.e. not the lottery tickets.
I sold a four-letter, non-acronym dot com a few years back. I held it for 15 years. What many would-be buyers did not know was that I regularly received offers for $50, $200, $2000, and $10,000. Many tried to argue with me what my domain name was really worth. Eventually, I negotiated a $40k price to sell to a corporation.
Non-acronyms (i.e. pronounceables) can be fairly valuable, something like namo.com is a treasure, but it's not what we're discussing here. On top of that this is anecdotal evidence. I'm not calling you a liar, but it's not something I can verify and therefore not something I'm going to base my investments off of.
$40k is a small budget for a company that spends millions each year on marketing a new product. But if the company is only buying the name for internal use, of course, it is not worth $15,000 to the buyer. As a seller, I really don't care if a buyer can justify the price or not.
Any high sale has to be justified. You can give up on clients that can't justify the price, but that's not necessarily the best strategy. We have plenty of stories of sellers being firm on the price, and when they come down the client has moved on, and they've missed out of the six-figure deal they're never going to see again.
The seller should do an investigation and price it even with more, if that moran wants the domain he should buy it, because from what I understand he is not after anything else but this one domain.
Then you do misunderstand the situation because he is looking for alternatives.
So dear buyer if you want it go buy it and don't waste our time here, crying on Twitter that you can't pay more, someone else will see more value one day.
It's not that he can't pay more, it's that he doesn't want to pay more than what it's worth. I'd take it one step further and say that hstf.com is unlikely to eve sell at the given price point. Because from a marketing perspective it's ineffective as a brand.