I've reached 4,100 domains this month and most of them are acquired individually via auction houses and some of them from direct owners. To reach at this level of portfolio size, it took a decade.
But in the last 3 years, I've doubled my portfolio. I don't plan to continue buying at the same speed as it takes lot of time, energy, and money.
Yeah, this is how it was for me too. There have been some people that put together a sizable portfolio from scratch in a couple years, but they usually have large amounts of money and even then, they've dedicated a large amount of their time to the effort, and focused on it every day. In addition, many of them spent hundreds of hours learning, or had years of knowledge in prior branding experience.
In 2018, I went through a period where I bought 1,000 domains in a month. That's about 33 per day and a $12k-$18k bill for the month. If I'm buying from expired auctions I'd say I can buy about 3-8 per hour. If I'm buying off of expired lists, I'd say it is about 1-4 per hour. Once I had my routine down, it would usually take about 5 hours per day. Sometimes it would take 10 hours. That's on top of my normal life. It was chaotic, but for me it works out better to buy it all at once like this and completely focus on it.
How do you do it? Filter a list of whatever type of domains you're looking for, get the list of 1,000 domains and start grinding away. It's painful, but after the first 10,000 names you'll get better at it. I ran them through my tool, but that cost me about $700 or so for the month in addition to the $12k-$18k. But even if you automate a portion of it like I did, it doesn't necessarily make it quicker, because I'd still do the same amount of research once I'd find a decent listing. Scanning the list is the fast part once you're efficient at it, but researching each potential purchase is what took most of my time. For me it was just grinding...hard.
In normal months I'm just buying 0-5 per day if I come across them. In the past, I'd look at a filtered list of 1,000 domains per day from the expired auctions and never missed a day in 2-3 years. Now, I don't look at the daily auctions unless I'm in a buying mode. Over the years I've learned that type of intentional focus works best for me. I focus on the 1-2 things I'm trying to achieve at the time and ignore all other type of tasks, work, or distractions as much as possible.
