Buying A Domain Name Soon To Expire: Any Advice

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

there is a domain name that I like that has been registered since 2005, but the page says it is under construction. It is set to expire in mid-October this year.

Internet archive doesn't really have anything for them. It looks like maybe they were going to be a private forum, but nothing ever came of it.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? should i try to contact them before it expires? or should I wait until the expiration date and see what happens?

Anyway, there don't seem to be ANY links to this domain name. It just is a nice domain name that I think has some branding potential.

thanks in advance.

[SilverShine]

Get a paid membership to #*$! to find out the historical information of any domain ownership. This will tell you if the same person or company has owned the domain and if so, they are could be waiting for an offer.

[DotDad]

Contact the owner now. Make them a reasonable offer.

Assume they will auto renew the name in October, so don't think or act like your are doing them a favor, nor that the name will be discarded in October. Its been renewed every year for years.

What's a reasonable offer? A price that puts you above the many people who have tried to get the name for nothing over the years.

First, dismiss the notion of getting the name for a steal. Then, look at names selling on marketplaces, like buy domains. Or come up with a price that you'd be happy to pay for the name. With that price in mind, offer them half the price. If the name is a good name, they will have received their fair share of lowball offers, and your offer will be considered reasonable. If they take your offer, you got a deal, its half of what you would have paid.

If they come back with a number 10x what you'd pay, then walk away and find another name.

[Hoople]

In addition to the above - give them time to get your offer email, digest it's content and respond.

We're techies mostly here and check email much more often than most. Two weeks isn't an unreasonable time.

Hold off sending any contemplated second offer until after that.

[Planet13]

Thanks for the tips, DotDad and Hoople.

I will have to think about how much the name might be wroth to me. It doesn't have any backlinks, and there aren't any keywords in the title. So I just don't know how much it is really "worth" to me yet.

Thanks again.

[SilverShine]

What would you sell it for if you owned it?

[Planet13]

What would you sell it for if you owned it?

you know, that is a good question...

I probably wouldn't sell it for much if anything. I might just give it away - if I had it for a long time and never developed it.

I mean, as far as I can tell, it has never had anything more than an Under Construction graphic on the homepage...

[SilverShine]

Unless you can find out traffic info, you won't be in a position to argue your price.

[Planet13]

Unless you can find out traffic info, you won't be in a position to argue your price.

Well, I will try to find out traffic info, but I am not sure where to look.

remember the site is (and always has been) just the homepage with an "under construction" graphic on it.

[SilverShine]

Actual traffic statistics will only be available from the domain owner if he/she is keeping any figures or they are with a parking program.

[sundaridevi]

I had this same dilemma recently. I found a promising domain that had been registered since 2002, but only had about three pages on it and looked abandoned. I continued to check up on it periodically for about a year and a half, and then when it came up for renewal the guy renewed. At that point I sent an email to the address on the whois and asked if he would like to sell, but no reply. About six months later I googled the guy to try to find some other contact info and found a very recent obituary for him (same name, same city), but he had died after I had emailed him. So at that point the domain was up for renewal within six months and I didn't know whether to wait and hope the registrar didn't put it up for auction if his successors did not renew or make an offer and have to maybe pay more. Finally I decided, after discussing with some associates, to make an offer. So I emailed him at that address and got a reply from his widow who as I expected told me he had passed away, and was understandably quite pre-occupied, but she agreed to my offer price immediately. To make a long story short, since she didn't know much about this process and I didn't want to walk her through, I hired GoDaddy domain buy to be the agent. I had to pay them something like a fixed fee plus a percentage, but they were in charge of making sure everything happened, which as I expected was more than a little time consuming.

So that's what I would recommend, use an agent (sedo.com is ok too i think) and let them be the intermediary in the negotation process if you think it will be difficult. GoDaddy's domain buy process includes a free domain value appraisal, and when I told them we already had agreed on a price, they said it was free. So their appraisal was only about 10% more than what I had offered. I don't know if they told her that or not, but everybody was happy.