Flippa feeds us their recently closed sales through an API, so if we have it that is what Flippa gave us. Kevin circles back with us from time to time to remove sales that didn't complete, but it is a very small percentage. He used to do it every few weeks, but lately it has been every few months.
This may be one of those cases, or it could be a case of one of the parties buying privacy from Flippa after the fact to remove the auction page. I think that costs $20 or something like that. I'm guessing that's what happened because it says "Domain Classified ended unsold" and isn't referring to the auction. Here's an example of what it generally looks like when an auction gets reversed:
https://flippa.com/6078474-loan-sc
My comment hasn't been approved on Ray's blog yet, but this is what I posted there regarding the GoDaddy expired auctions that ended up getting renewed or transferred out:
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Verifying sales is often tricky and always time consuming. And even if you "verify" a WHOIS change, you still can't be 100% sure of the price because many venues sell to the runner up when the winner doesn't pay instead of doing a re-auction. In this case you know a sale happened but the price could be thousands less than the auction ended at. And when I say you "know" I use that word very loosely, because someone could renew and change the WHOIS, put it under privacy, etc. Heck, the sale could be valid but the winner puts it back in the old owner's name for a bit to make it look like it didn't complete.
Smarketing.com is a good example of a tricky one. This was renewed, but both the WHOIS and the DNS are totally different than before it expired. I assume Ray looked up the company name that used to be in the WHOIS and did a WHOIS on that, and then you can tell that it never actually changed hands. But at a quick glance it looks like a sale went through.
To create software that can deal with all of these crazy situations would be both difficult and very expensive. WHOIS history is 18 cents per query the last I checked. To verify a sale you'd have to check several dates around the date of the closed auction, at minimum one date a few months before expiration and one date around a month after expiration. So to even make a rough pass at cleaning up the existing data would cost around $150,000 and almost $400/day moving forward. NameBio doesn't even make $400 per day so that, or hiring two full-time staffers to verify every sale, simply isn't practical.
We do our best to give people a clue what is going on in a market almost entirely devoid of transparency. But to expect perfect accuracy with the volume of data we're providing isn't reasonable. Like Joseph said, use it as a guide and do your own homework from there.
I would love to see more venues stepping up and sharing data, and not just the $2k+ sales either. That's the only realistic way to have completely accurate data. But given the value of this data, many venues don't want to share and see it as a proprietary advantage. So the only alternative is to let us know when you notice a sale didn't go through and crowd source it. I'm more than happy to remove sales that didn't complete and I do it on a regular basis.
I removed the sales Ray pointed out after confirming them myself.
