Input sought - How has last month been in sales and queries?

Hi NamePros friends,

I am working on an article on statistical trends due to the pandemic. I am not yet 100% sure whether I will find any clear enough trends to publish it at NamePros, but if I do I would also like to include commentary from domain investors as part of the article.

Therefore, if you would be so kind, please add in replies to this post any information or comments that you are willing to share publicly. By posting here I am assuming that you are fine with me quoting you in the article, with attribution of course.

1. Have you seen any significant changes in number of offers, sales or inquiries during the past month?
2. On the sales front, have you seen changes in the types of domain names that are getting traffic or inquiries, either in terms of price level or niche?
3. If you do parking, have you noted any change in parking revenue of late? (e.g. more people on Internet, has it meant more visits to parking sites and clicks).

While I will not be able to include all comments, I really appreciate all who take the time to respond.

Sincerely,

Bob

 

1. Offer increase about 35 % , but average final close on installment (60%) , 40 % on BIN

2. Some change on domain that related with health , security and financial

3. Parking revenue in stable condition , traffic increase but low on converting ads

 

Thanks for your reply!

To make sure I understand, you are saying more than half are now selecting payment by installments, and that is a change from before?

Bob

 

Yes Bob , I usually close every the sale via BIN

 

1. No feb and march were same for me
2. well the tourism niche got the strongest hit, I saw an increase in health insurance niche.
3. parking traffic went globally up and it is still globally up. revenues during the first 15 days of March was pretty bad, then i had an explosion and I was able to come back to my usual average. April is starting bad and worse than first 15 days of March on revenues average..

 

Inbound offers have increased at CoronaNames.com

 

Thanks to those who have already responded, and hope many more will leave their input as well.

If you feel that the size of your portfolio is such that in one month you can't really conclude anything, i am still interested in your perceptions of what is probably happening in the market.

Thanks in advance,

Bob

 

Bob, my sales were really slow in early to mid March, so I adjusted my prices a few weeks ago and saw more inquires and sales since then. The top 10-15% of my domains I did not lower the price on, but the rest I lowered about 50%. I have seen more than normal sales for my lower priced domains. It could be just a coincidence, but I did sell a couple of CPA domains from different buyers.
I recently received a low 5 digit offer on a domain in an industry that is thriving now because of the pandemic. I countered so I should find out this week if the offer was serious.

 

March is historically a busier month for me so I compared the last 45 days to the prior year.

Overall 54% less names sold, but a 174% increase in revenue. With my big sale removed, it is still an 8% increase over last year's revenue during the same period.



I set all my minimum offers pretty high so I've gotten zero or close to zero inquiries, but that is normal.

 

which parking company did u have this explosion on? Ty

 

Since the beginning of March, I'm seeing less number of sales and offers coming in till now.
Sales are happening but are on lower end and no big sales.

 

Thanks for sharing - great transparency......

 

Great 2020 thus far, consistent sales with more offers than normal as well— significantly better than same time period in 2019.

 

As mentioned in a previous post, domain sales can be sporadic - many weeks with no sales and then one solid sale out of the blue or even two in a short timeframe. Between Friday and Sunday I had three sales (low $xxx, high $xxx and mid-$xxxx) but if I go several months without another sale then I could not conclude things are picking up. We'll see what transpired in the coming weeks.

 

I have a relatively small sample size but a few bits I can share...

A breakdown of sales below (before commission and taxes):

• January: 5 sales, $10.2k total, $2049 avg
• February: 4 sales, $6.5k total, $1622 avg
• March: 7 sales, $7.9k total, $1133 avg

I'm doing a similar volume of sales this year (vs last year) but my avg price is down:

• Q1 2020: 16 sales, $24.6k total, $1538 avg
• Q1 2019: 14 sales, $27.0k total, $1931 avg

Some other bits worth sharing:

• My total traffic across roughly 2000 domains is up by 20% (vs January)
• Inquiries were slightly up for me in March. I don't get many (10 to 15 per month) but I had more last month than in Jan or Feb
• Many buyers are savvy - they are making low offers with the knowledge that asset owners might be more flexible.
• A bunch of deals defaulted - either during negotiations or after agreement. In every case, the other party cited something related to the current market climate.
• Part of the reduction from the average sales price is because I've lowered some prices/expectations across half of the portfolio, just to keep cash flow going.
• In the past, I've averaged approx $2k per transaction (before commission and taxes), and last month ended up closer to $1100

 

Bodis. Then some positive sign from voodoo

 

I've only been recording net revenue on my sales spreadsheet (after deducting commission, transfer fees, escrow fees etc., gross sales numbers below are estimates.). I will start to record gross sales from now on. The majority of my sales are BIN, very few payment plans from time to time.

There are about 7000 names in my portfolio that were acquired before new year.

Sales This year:
Janurary - $35k net, around $40K gross sales, 14 sales
Feburary - $39k net, around $50K gross sales, 17 sales
March - Only did around $10K
April - so far had $20K gross, 6 sales in the first 10 days. I've also declined 2 offers of $1k each (both listed for $2-3k)

Comparing to last year:
Janurary - $32k net, around $38k gross sales, 15 sales
Februrary - $23k net, around $27K gross sales, 10 sales
March - $61k net, over $70K gross sales, 15 sales


Conclusion:
It is clear that the pandemic has affected sales last month, to a pretty severe extent in my case. At least 3-4 sales fell through after agreements. I considered lowering prices on some names in my portfolio due to the situation, but I decided not to at the end. In fact, as I was going through my portfolio, I increased prices on my premium names.

I wanted to observe for another 2 months or so, as I believed there was a shock factor in play, and I was hoping that the market will bounce back gradually if not a V shape recovery - when people get more or less used to the situation.

So far, judging from the sales this month, I think I was right. However, it might be too early to draw any firm conclusion.

Industry wise, there hasn't been any noticeable difference for me. I invest in industries I love and/or know about, mostly technology, food, fashion, startup, travel, finance, hospitality.

The industries for sales this month are exactly those: fashion, finance, technology.

I do not monitor my traffic much, nor do I earn any parking revenue, so I'm no help on those.

Hopefully these data can be of some help for your research.

 

Really appreciate all of the input provided. Many who provided specific data really appreciate both your transparency and the work you put into summarizing things. Thank you, thank you, thank you all!!

It would be interesting to see how many are doing this. At least one person on last social hour indicated a similar strategy and results to your own.

Interesting, and encouraging.

Thanks, so glad you replied with your record of a steady stream of major sales. Some have speculated that the upper end may be seeing more of a pull back, which makes sense as company rebranding and new marketing campaigns focus on more day to day things during the pandemic.

Thanks so much for your detailed data and observations such as this. I had not thought of that point before, but it makes perfect sense.

Thanks for your detailed, and impressive, sales data, and also this observation. I think most feel that domain names will recover, if they have or will suffer a downturn which is still not clear, but will it be a rapid return to previous values or something else.

Thanks once more, everyone.

Bob

 

great sales.. tons of domainers sell in a year what you sell in a monht.

i'd like to ask what kind of portofolio you hold to achieve such results? for instance, avg cost price of your domains, are they old quality domains or on the cheaper expired or closeout or handreg range?

what else do you think in your view would be important info to share about yoru folio or your sale strategies, that could in your view help others achieve similar results to yours?

do your net numbers above take into account acquisition costs as well? sorry but you did not mention acquisition costs in the brackets there among commisions, escrow etc.

many thanks!

 

Thanks @alcy . I’m still in the process of writing that long post about my portfolio/sales stats/domaining journey, which I’ve mentioned in other threads before. It will just take me some time as it’s a lot of information...starting from digging through my emails and finding gross sale numbers for hundreds of names haha.

Here I will do my best to answer your questions, but I will give more details in a future post.

My portfolio is a mixed pot from all kinds of sources. Many people on the forum remember me joining the forum in 2016 and was buying domains all over the place.

I started very late and I wanted to build a decent sized portfolio as fast I as I possibly could, so I bought from all the sources I could think of - all the auction platforms, the forum, private acquisitions, dropcatching, marketplaces etc. So most of my portfolio is from the aftermarket.

I did some handreg in the very beginning, but most of them were dropped after the first year. Now that I have a lot more experience, I actually started to handreg some here and there again, especially for emerging technologies. But hand reg is still only a very small percentage of my portfolio. I love love good aged keyword domains, but just as much as I love newer trendy startup-y names. I only focus on brandables and what I can envision being names of new startups, and I think that is very important - being able to see uses for every name you buy. In fact, I get many new business ideas from the names I buy, so much so that I intentionally price some names higher just so I don’t sell them too fast, hoping to develop them myself one day when I have time.

My overall acquisition cost is around $1xx, however, top 2 names I own already cost around $100K, and I've bought quite a bit of liquid names averaging $xxxx each. Taken those out, average acquisition cost for rest of the names would be $xx. I've definitely overpaid for a lot of names in auctions given the current state of the aftermarket, but I've balanced those cost out by finding names that slip under the radar - more on that in the future post.

The net sales from the post above include the acquisition costs, but acquisition costs are pretty much negligible for the most part. Most of the time, acquisition costs are 2-3% of the sales price, in exceptional cases, it could be 5-10% of sales price for bigger sales. Why 2-3%? Because that’s my annual sell through rate, and I always try to get all my new investments back in a year.

I don’t have any special sales strategy. I list all names on Afternic/Sedo and point them to Dan. Everything has BIN prices. I used to have my own landing pages, but had to switch to Dan because of an international relocation and I was no longer able to accept credit card payments. It worked out quite well as I know that I'm not very good at negotiation haha. Nowadays, Afternic brokers and Dan handle most of the inquiries. Majority of the names are just sold at the listed BIN prices.

As I mentioned in other posts before, I believe good names sell themselves. I have a few hundred names listed on various marketplaces, but I see them more as learning experiences. I still like to have full control over my portfolio.

 

thanks for this great info. look forward to yoru future thread on this.

now that you mention it, I joined around same time as you, but I think your name rings a bell as somebody who was very active selling and buying a lot of names. but I guess in the end it paidoff and you got the hang of things.

sorry if you already said this before, but one final question i'd like to ask for now is what size folio you hold roughly.. or did you say few 100s of names in total? many thanks again and its inspiring to see your sales. as I Said, most domainers make in a year what you make in a month so its impressive. but.. usually also money makes money... so if some domainers are able to afford buying a domain for say 100k... only to resell it for 500k or 1 million, then there is already your big head start in domaining.

cheers

 

I bought around 5000-6000 in 2016/17, then added another bit more than 1000 in 2018-2019. So I had around 7000 names for the past couple of years.

I just added a couple thousand more names this year as I decided to scale my business and portfolio for the coming year, am also in the process of rebuilding my portfolio site.

I didn't have a a lucky big sale or anything...I've been an entrepreneur for quite some time, so I came into domaining with initial capital. I started investing in domains after selling my previous company.

I also didn't just dump half a million dollars in domains and hope for the best. I started investing with maybe high 4 figure-low 5 figure, and when I figured out what I was doing (by endless amount of hard work), I scaled up - and scaled up as fast as I possibly could.

I have yet to sell my biggest purchases yet, but I see them as long term investments, separate from the main portfolio.

And now let's get the thread back on Bob's topic haha.

 

yes. I meant in general.. that money makes money.... so im sure there were cases of domainers investing 100k and selling for 500k or so.. so that helps but I do hope your couple of 100k worth names will do just that for you as well in future! all the best and yes, lets' not make Bob mad now (joke... I know Bob never gets mad). cheers.

 

Short and sweet! Inquiries/sales about the same. More liquidation sales. Increased visitors to landing pages but no increased sales as of yet!

Cheers

 

Inquiries are up - sales flat.