Do a little leg work and you can nab expiring domains for a fraction of the price.
Competition for top expired domain names on NameJet and Snapnames is fierce, and auction prices go sky high. What if there was a way to usurp the auction process and buy premium expired domains at fixed prices? There is. It takes a little work, but your smarter domainer friends are already doing it.
When a domain name expires, it gets added to the queue at partner expired domain services (e.g. Network Solutions to NameJet). You can take the easy way out and backorder the domain, only to face off against 100 people in an expired domain auction…
Or you can contact the previous owner and buy it at a fraction of the price. People have been doing this for years, and I ran an experiment last year to see if it was worthwhile.
Now, the expired domain companies and their partner registrars aren’t dummies. That’s why they switch whois information to private and often block archive.org access as soon as a domain expires. That makes it harder to find the owner. So you need to sign up for an account at DomainTools to look at historical contact for the domain.
Once you get the email address from the historical record, you send an email to the owner:
“I noticed you let domain name xyz expire. I might be interested in buying it…”
99% of the time your email will bounce. If it’s a good domain and expiring, odds are the owner has outdated email information. So your next step is to pick up the phone and call the number in historical whois.
I tried buying about 50 domains this way last year, focusing on three letter domains and other high value domains identified by FreshDrop. Here was my experience:
1. Received response from 5 out of about 50 domain owners. Majority of others had no valid contact info.
2. 3 of 5 said they planned to renew the domain and just hadn’t gotten around to it.
3. 2 others engaged with me. On one I thought I had a deal, but someone else was also playing this game and convinced the owner to sell to him instead before I had a chance to counter. It was a good three character domain that also was a word. (The owner of that domain told me “man, you’re like the third person to call me today about this domain”.) The other was a three character domain that I nabbed for $2,500.
As an individual, it may not be worth your time to contact 50 people manually to acquire one three character domain at a good price. But if you systematize it, and perhaps outsource some of the contact legwork, it could be very profitable.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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