.Com.Au Slump

[Philip Littlewood]

Specifically with reference to Drops, I think the interest levels are still there, it is just that the number of high quality domains dropping has reduced. Part of this may be influenced by auDA Auto Renewal Policy. This may have an impact with large Registrars like Melbourne IT that have a lot of corporate clients who hold quality domains.

As for the general market, I am regularly dealing with decent transactions of .au domains, I negotiated a sale at $20,000 today. As some of the other members have said buyers want confidentiality so all the big deals cant be reported.

We have definitely seen some strong sales. The trick is finding the end user. Our best sale of the last 3 months was www.wine.com.au

 

[findtim]

The trick is finding the end user.

couldn't agree more

tim

 

[snoopy]

couldn't agree more

tim

"Finding an enduser" is something that is low probability or depends on doing a lot of legwork. The degree of interest depends on the quality/commercial value of the domain.

Personally I've found finding that buyer by waiting for a very good names will take decades, and somewhat longer for ok quality stuff. eg 100 very high quality names might yield a couple of sales a year at well above what domainers would pay. Searching to get a fast sale is fine as long as the person is really calculating their ROI and factoring in the value of their time. Though the price they get whilst hopefully above what a domainer will pay is probably not as high as waiting because it is selling to less motivated buyers.

What a domainer will pay is the market value in my view (ie the highest bidder in an auction). It is what a domain can be sold for right now, not at some uncertain time.

What that domainer will pay simply reflects what domainers think is the prospects for the name, in terms of finding that buyer or doing something with it themselves. So whilst an undisclosed sale might have recently occurred it doesn't say anything for the state of the market, that can only be measured by actual reported sales.

For all we know 2 years ago there might have been twice as many undisclosed sales. There is no data so it isn't really worth thinking about when it comes to the state of market.

The NDA stuff is trotted out whenever the sales stats are bad, in pretty much all extensions.