I think the more important question is, how do you find domains that are about to expire? I don't know what the domain hoarders do but here is what I do.

I discovered that pool.com maintains a list of domains that are set to expire. I download and filter the list and then email myself a list of domains that match my requirements (.coms under a certain length, no numbers or other funny characters, maybe .coms with a specific word in them). I actually just wrote this script, it had been on my to-do list for over a year. The daily email contains hundreds of domains so I might have to filter it more.

https://gist.github.com/3914495 Here's my script, it only uses PHP to get tomorrow's date, otherwise it's standard linux utilities like wget, egrep, unzip, cut, sed...

I have it set up as a daily cron job.

I'm interested in suggestions on how to snipe/reserve/etc domains as soon as they become available.

Would love to know this too -- and am curious how the players in the market end up snatching these sites.

godaddy has some on their ftp: ftp://ftp.godaddy.com/

It includes member auctions etc.

I'd guess other services have similar?

update .com TLD zone maps? look for the ones that got removed ... that's my guess.