In my Sales Roundup this week, I’m taking a look to find the stories behind four sales from DNJournal’s weekly chart covering sales from February 10th – 16th, 2020. As always with The Sales Roundup, we’re looking to find out why each domain name may have achieved the price it did.
BTI.com – $100,000
Three-letter .COM domain sales can largely be broken up into two categories: investor and end-user, with each category mostly trading at distinct price points. The majority of lower five-figure sales are acquired by investors, whereas most six-figure sales are end-user purchases.
This six-figure purchase is no different, as it was acquired by an end-user, a company called Brave Thinking Institute.
BTI.com was sold in conjunction with Uniregistry, and James Booth, an investor, and a broker who maintains a portfolio of three-letter and one-word .COM domains. According to WHOIS history, James Booth was the owner of BTI.com, a name that was acquired from a publicly-traded company called Windstream in 2019 for an undisclosed fee.
The sales prices of BTI.com was certainly in the ballpark for a price you may expect to attain when selling to the right end-user. In the past year, we’ve seen the likes of AOA.com, EEN.com, and NCC.com sell for six-figures a piece. The combination of letters in BTI.com, with “I” as the end letter (which could stand for international, inc, or index, for example) made BTI.com a fairly safe investment for James, and certainly was justifiably sold for $100,000.
JetSki.com – $57,500
The JetSki.com domain name was sold for $57,500 by Joe Uddeme, a top broker who operates the NameExperts brand. Joe rarely releases his sales figures, but he has previously disclosed sales such as Fora.com ($285,000), MK.com ($700,000), and 20.com ($1.75 million).
For this domain, Joe seems to have represented the name for around a year before its sale. JetSki.com was featured in NameExperts’ newsletter numerous times from February 2019 to February 2020. In October 2019, the domain held a $125,000 asking price.
By February 2020, the asking price was reduced to $85,000, but the final sales price was $57,500.
The domain was picked up by investor Brent Oxley, who has a history of acquiring highly valuable domains for above the perceived “investor” price range. This, I believe, is another example of that. At $57,500, this may be a higher price than many other investors are willing to sell for, but Brent will likely sit on this name until a significantly higher offer is received, so expect to see this domain sell for a higher amount in the future.
Fluxon.com – $36,000
In at number three on our list is the domain Fluxon.com, which was sold for $36,000. I wasn’t aware of the word “fluxon” before now, but Wikipedia it’s a “quantum of electromagnetic flux”. The keyword isn’t that popular, with dotDB listing “fluxon” as being registered in 24 extensions, compared with “Jet Ski”, for example, which is registered in 110.
At $36,000, my initial reaction was that this was an end-user sale. I was right. Fluxon is a San Francisco-based company, founded by some ex-Googlers with a mission to help startups launch their products at lightning speed.
This was a domain upgrade for Fluxon, a company that was founded in 2017 and existed on the Fluxon.co domain before this. As far as the price goes, I think this was a win-win. The seller received a healthy amount of money for an obscure one-word .COM and a company managed to get its exact brand match .COM.
Flammen.com – $30,000
In Danish, Flammen means “flame”, and that is key to understanding why this domain sold for $30,000. Let’s start off with who sold this name. It was sold by DomainMarket.com, owned and operated by Mike Mann. Mike has a history of selling moderately valuable names for high prices. With over 300,000 names under ownership, he needs to achieve high sales prices in order to pay for his acquisitions and renewal fees. A $30,000 sales price is fairly typical for Mike Mann.
But who would pay $30,000 for Flammen.com? It turns out that it’s a restaurant chain called “Flammen” that has eateries dotted around Denmark in fifteen locations, with one restaurant in Hamburg, Germany.
The domain currently forwards to Restaurant-Flammen.dk, but perhaps Flammen’s management is looking to brand under Flammen.com. This would make perfect sense if the company is looking to expand internationally.
This is a similar strategy decision to the one that Grupo Cappuccino made by acquiring Cappuccino.com for $49,000 (as profiled here).