The Sales Roundup is a weekly insight into why certain domains sell for specific prices. We see tonnes of data every day, and it’s often very difficult to understand why a certain domain sells for a certain amount.
In my Sales Roundup, I’m looking at the story behind five domain sales that were listed on the DNJournal chart, published on May 13th, 2020. Those five names are Therapists.com, UHR.de, Cappuccino.com, Searcher.com, and WI.de.
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Therapists.com – $91,183
Our top sale this week is Therapists.com. Sold by broker Kate Buckley for $91,183, Therapists.com represents the exact match search term for an entire industry. According to SearchVolume.io, “Therapists” receives 3,600 searches per month and the singular “Therapist” receives 60,500. The CPC (cost per click) for each of these terms is around $3.50 per click.
Therapists.com could be developed into a lucrative lead generation website for therapists. According to Archive.org, the domain did previously hold a website for finding a local therapist.
Ten years ago, Therapists.com sold for $50,000, and it seems to have been owned by the same person up until this 2020 sale for $91,183. Unfortunately, we have less of an idea about who the new owner is since there is currently no website on the domain, and the WHOIS details are under privacy protection.
At $91,183, this is likely to be an end-user or a developer sale – someone who is going to harness the power of the therapist keyword to build a brand or lead generation site.
UHR.de – $76,300
In second place this week is one of the top five three-letter .DE sales of all time, according to NameBio. At $76,300, this is certainly an end-user sale. If we look at other three-letter .DE sales, we see most taking place in the three- to four-figure range, so why would anyone pay this much for a .DE when UHR.com is listed for sale, and possibly attainable for somewhere around that $76,300 mark?
The .DE extension is the extension for Germany, and according to Google Translate, “Uhr” is actually the German for “Clock. Appropriately, Uhr.de used to host an online shop offering watches for sale. In early 2020, the domain forwarded to Urhzeit.org, which also held an e-commerce site.
Now, curiously, Uhr.de holds a “For Sale” page. Why would someone pay a $76,300 fee for a .DE domain in order to resell it? According to the for sale page, the domain is now owned by BusinessAngels.de, a company founded by Marcus Seidel that owns thousands of .DE domains and looks to develop projects on select .DE names, too. They also enter into joint ventures with people to develop their names, so perhaps that’s the reason behind paying such a high figure.
Cappuccino.com – $49,000
Sedo produced the sale of Cappuccino.com for $49,000 to grab third place this week. According to DomainIQ’s WHOIS history tool, Cappuccino.com has been owned by a couple of prominent investors in the past. Firstly, it was listed as being owned by Top Notch Domains LLC, run by Elliot Silver of DomainInvesting.com, then the name started redirecting to MediaOptions.com, although it’s unclear from WHOIS history whether the name was owned by Media Options, a client of Media Options, or Andrew Rosener personally.
What we do know is that it was acquired by an end-user this year, as Grupo Cappuccino took the chance to upgrade their domain name from GrupoCappuccino.com to Cappucino.com for a reasonable price, as Cappuccino is a popular drink worldwide. Grupo Cappuccino owns and operates a chain of premium restaurants and cafes across Spain, as well as one hotel.
Although $49,000 is certainly above investor pricing, $49,000 is a reasonable amount to pay for a company to upgrade their domain name to a one-word .COM.
Searcher.com – $40,000
Another one-word .COM sale from this week is Searcher.com, which sold for $40,000. According to NameBio, this is a higher sales price than other one-word .COM names ending in “er” in the last year. Picker.com, for example, sold at $22,800 at NameJet.
Searcher.com, however, sold at Sedo, which may signify an end-user purchase. I say “may” because again, we don’t know the identity of the buyer. As of writing, the name is under privacy protection at GoDaddy and doesn’t display a website at the moment.
According to Crunchbase, there are several companies using the term “Searcher” in their company name, but nothing exact. It remains to be seen what happens to Searcher.com, but given the sales price and the sales venue, I’d say that this was an end-user purchase.
WI.de – $32,428
Rounding off this week’s chart is WI.de, which sold for $32,428, again at Sedo. This is another .DE sale, but you could argue that this could be seen as a “hack” domain, where the left and right of the dot combine to make a common word. Other examples of hacks that have sold in the past, according to NameBio, are:
- S.top for $161,684
- Net.work for $100,000
- C.at for $60,467
- Wall.et for $45,650
These are all at the higher end of the domain hacks scale, with NameBio listing the average sales price of a domain hack at under $4,000.
If we take the name to be a two-letter .DE, the name has probably sold for around the average price. According to NameBio, the likes of BE.de, HS.de, and DJ.de have all sold in the last year for a price in the $20,000 range. The RS.de name sold for $78,631.
Although we can agree that there is plenty of evidence to show that WI.de sold for a fair amount, the identity of the new owner is a mystery. As with all .DE domains, the WHOIS details have been obscured, and the domain currently hosts a default Sedo parking page.
UHR.de was a great sale! Seller did very well!
If therapists.com sold for $91K, then how much is the singular worth? It has a BIN at Afternic for $300K.
Therapist.com is worth at least 300K. The singular version is usually worth more because it sounds like a brand. We sold Whisky.com for $3.1 million, but Whiskies.com would probably command only a fraction of that. Of course, there are exceptions like Hotels.com and Cars.com.