The Domain Appraisal – Both Sides Of The Coin.

Everyone is well aware of the domain appraisal “scam” where you can fall victim if you are a domain owner. Basically what happens is a person, or group of people will do bulk whois lookups. Then they harvest a simple list of:

Domain | eMail in whois

expron.com | <my email>
So on..

Then they use bulk mailers to send you emails that sound lik ethey are interested in your domain name. They then offer to get your domain appraised. They will list out 2 or so appraisal services & price. Usually it will ask for an appraisal at sedo.com <price> or <their website> <lower price>. If you really really want to sell your domain, you could very easily fall victim.

Blah Blah, you all have heard that story..

Here’s my story on the coin flip of the domain appraisal scam.

Back in 2008, I was searching dictionary domain words that were up & running sites in .com & .net. Long story short, I found that when I inquired about certain domains, I would get an appraisal. Some LL.com domains would hand me a PDF appraisal for $250,000 – $750,000. Most were from real appriasal companies. I did my homework & found that these companies cater to high end domains etc..

So my journey continued. Finally I hit a soft sale. It’s my terminology for something that I felt was do-able & withing my budget. In other words, move fast & buy this domain!

The domain in question was Delete<.>net. The owner, Jim from California had originally registered the domain back in 1996. He was an ISP provider & knew everything about computer network backbones. He lacked however the knowledge of domaining.

Things were going great.. He asked me to make him an offer. Being a domainer myself, I offered high $xxx. He quickly got excited & I almost closed the deal. He asked to “think” about it overnight. I said no problems & awaited his email.

The next day, his friend got into his head & now the minimum cash sale for delete<.>net jumped up to $1,500 min, preferably $2,500. Now I was trying to stand ground on my $850 – $999 offer. But in a heartbeat, I was snuffed as he surfed the web & try to educate himself if the sale was worth it. I had no leverage, nothing.

So now, I had to contact him. I had to contact him a couple times. After a while, Jim replies.. I am getting a godaddy appraisal & it will be ready in 48 hours.

The appraisal comes in & it’s estimating the domain Delete<.>net is worth $17,290.00

Darn, there went all my hope. I was lucky to be able to harness the opportunity I had opened. The seller was expecting $17K for his domain. The best I could do was broker the domain. I aligned the sale with Kellie from Name.com. She paid Mid $x,xxx. It was a private sale & my Commision was mid $xxx

So I guess everyone got what they wanted. Except me, had I secured the domain for $900 or so as originally planned, I could have easily flipped it & kept mid $x,xxx for free. So in this story, the godaddy appraisal killed me. It would be nice to think that the domain was worth seventeen thousand, but it’s not. It’s also my mistake for the low offer.

A couple things that stick out is that at the time, I wasn’t really active at the forums. And the offers I got from forum people even those with high post counts was ridiculous.

I got remarks at the forums like:

If it was .com, it would be worth a lot more! <ps – .net is 2nd best>.
If it was a happy domain like: Smile.net, Laugh.net, happy.net.. I would be interested.
The domain is not worth anything. I offer from $20 – $1,000 24 hour time capsule.
The domain will never sell for more than $500.

Guess I proved them wrong

It was worth it to me as well as I continue to get in good with Name.com, developing their API stuff & tools for their domain registrations. Also, Jim is a good ISP resource for me – If I would ever need help from a veteran.

Just be careful in these appraisals as it seems to inflate what the seller “thinks” his domain is worth. Until you try to sell, he/she won’t know.

I also chased: EBS.TV the other night. I got beat out by Pollin, the owner of Ahead.tv.

No biggie as I was drop catching this expiring .TV for a friend. It’s just nice when a triple premium letters .TV domain drops & doesn’t require the hefty “premium” charges from ENOM.

EBS.TV is still a non premium & would have cost me $21.99 or whatever Dynadot is charging had I snagged it. If I caught it, the domain would never enter into the “premium” pricing category – because ENOM would have lost control of it. Once registered by Dynadot, the enom premium fees can never apply to the domain again. Furthermore, Dynadot has a set price, which doesn’t include premium fees.

I’ll post here about the next LLL.TV I catch without premium fees

I was drop chasing these pending delete domains today:

splattered.com
flammables.net
suffixes.net
conceptualist.net
compensation.us
foaming.us
fuels.us
buckets.us

As you can imagine, the best ones were taken by backorders. I did however catch 3 of the drops. Here’s what I grabbed:

flammables.net
suffixes.net
foaming.us

These will be warehoused & auctioned off at DNKO at a later date. I am not dissapointed with what I was able to catch. I admit there were others I liked, but I wanted to see what I could grab without being greedy about it.

Drop catching is a funny business. It’s about 1% in your drop lists & list order & 99% luck. You never know what you can or can’t land until you try.

What suprises me is that I made an upgrade to my Dynadot API drop catcher. It basically scooped up all the domains I caught into one account. I have high hopes for the upgrade I made & I will be investing in more Dynadot bulk accounts.

This is one of the first times I have succeeded at capturing dictionary word .net’s. I also noticed that the domain: conceptualist.net was also caught at Dynadot.com Perhaps with my own drop catcher script that I sell. This is encouraging news for me to increase the quality level of what I chase & what I can grab.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Here’s the list of pending delete domain names that I will be going after today:

splattered.com
flammables.net
suffixes.net
conceptualist.net
compensation.us
foaming.us
fuels.us
buckets.us

Hope I can grab a few of these gems!

These are the two domains I chased today:

fdmg.com
verdugocity.com

I know that the quad premium LLLL.com was a far fetched try, but why not! What do I have to lose? Afterall it was in pending delete. As I guessed, Pool beat me on the catch because I am certain various backorders were put in at all the backorder sites. Quad premiums continue to hold value & the sales aren’t too bad at the moment.

The other domain I went after was Verdgocity.com. I was beat out by BlueRazor on this name. Verdugocity is a real city in California. That’s why it caught my eye. I thought I could have stood a chance, but it was a no-go. Sure enough, I got beat out.

I haven’t been chasing anything else lately. Mostly because I have some domains warehoused that I would like to sell off first before overwhelming myself in purchases – without concentrating on sales.

I went after these domains that were expiring:

gmv.us
qub.us
wrt.us

I didn’t catch a single one.  Snapnames got 2 & a godaddy backorder grabbed one. I hope tomorrow brings better luck!

I am going to chase 3 domain names today. It’s pretty stupid for me to chase these as I know for a fact they have been backordered. The domains I will be going after are 3 Letter .US drops. I’ve made my list & will shortly be going after these domains:

gmv.us
qub.us
wrt.us

All 3 are in pending delete & will be dropping in around 35 minutes.

Wish me luck, but I really doubt that I will be able to catch any of these drops. If I do manage to even catch one, I will be a happy camper & it will make my weekend!

However, the sun is bound to shine on

After launching a few of my sites, I am finding that there’s a lot of non – “nay sayer” forum domainers in the real world.

Not that I am calling every forum domainer a “nay sayer”, but we’ve all had our doses. I am just glad to report that yes, there are real people out there at all of levels (from big to small) that have never stepped foot into a domain “forum”.

The misconceptions range from: Digital Point is full of hackers & you WILL get scammed, NamePros controls how you view domaining and for DNF well, simply the forum is full of domainer’s who’s ego’s have blown out of their chests.

With services like twitter, facebook.. even MySpace – I am finding more of the teach & learn technique. I share with a genuine follower what I do every day & in return I sometimes learn something new. It’s like a kind of push & give or give & grab new insight.

I do enjoy the fact that forums do put you in touch with people, services & do fufil a need. You can find a ton of useful info. But Also, I find that domainers can become forum rats. Always quitting or vanishing from the forums & coming back.. or the regular lame posts.. over & over again.. c’mon.

I guess after venturing out into the real world, I am finding more & more genuine people like myself who are actually doing it. We’re not farting around & posting useless stuff on forums. We’re actually doing the work & getting paid. Or if not paid, we know we will soon. We’ve learned better & understand that a post thread bump will only gain 1-5 new visitors a day. While the hard work is getting us repeat visitors.

The people who do the work daily, by going out & mingling deserve my congratulations.  A real domainer will be spending quality time in for example finding another end user sale.. or eye balling the drop lists. If you are out on the forums, you are losing quality time.

For me, it is discipline that keeps me away from forums & movies, tv shows. etc. I have so many things to work on, that I wish I had the time to fart around at the major domaining forums. I am off to do the work & pave new ways for every domainer & while doing so am finding cool people who are also doing the same.

I have doubled my contacts from people who reach out to me & never even heard of namepros. They are now members.. and that helps the forums, but I guess every domainer & his mom has a NP acct

Moniker.com has been one of the funkiest domain registars I have ever dealt with. First off, from day one – I faced like a 5-6 day response window for my support tickets. Back in those days, Monte used to hangout at the forums & an instant PM got him on the horn or got my account manager right on my needs.

After following some feedback & threads, after the domain acquisition of OverSee.net taking over Moniker, it’s been a real down hill battle. Their support is worse & god forbid you happen to ask about their “secret” API program.

They will begin by saying.. “sure, no problem”. Followed by please wait.. Then about 1-2 months later, you can expect the regular response.. No sorry, the API is not available at this time – sorry.

You would think a company WANTS to make money and register bulk domains. But nope, not in this case. You’re out of luck & just wasted a ton of time.

I’ve boiled it down to these requirements to get into their API program:

1. You already have quality domains at Moniker.
2. You bring in the Volume in purchases before asking for API accesss.
3. You know someone who works there or have an old contact you can email.

Other than that, forget about even asking for moniker’s API to add your IP to the whitelist. I know that JerseyGirl does a great job & extinguishes the flames across the forums, but that is one registry that needs to get it together. It’s not that hard to do & your payback would ten fold if you listen to your customers for better support & API access to the average Domainer that promises to hit the API @ 1 domain per second (as outlined in the rules).

Since I developed some effective drop catching software for the ENOM Reseller (API) Program, it has come to my attention that ENOM is now rejecting API calls to their reseller API during the drop window. If that isn’t odd enough, they actually enforce the API ban for about 4 hours total (1pm – 5PM CST).

It seems to me like they are checking the whois of each domain that is processed via their API. During the ban, their API works fine for any domain that is not in “pending delete” status – But flat out fails to grab any dropping domain. This “change” has come about over the past few days – 1 week’s time.

Perhaps this is a temporary bug? Or permanent? I am not sure, but all I know is that ENOM which was once the drop catcher’s #1 API reseller program – has cut the cord on drop catching activity. I guess drop catchers will need to find other sources and API’s to use for their daily drop catching.

This will really hurt enom. This issue was reported to me by drop catchers that catch between 30-50 domains a day. So it will greatly impact the market from sharks to the sardines.

I have yet to test & find out if this API issue also applies to the CCTld drops. I believe it has only impaired the .com & .net drop catching connections.

More to follow as I get some answers from ENOM.