Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

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I'm actually just about to go through the process of acquiring a somewhat recently dropped domain from BuyDomains.com for my new project. The current asking price for the domain is around $4,000 on their site.

Anyone worked with them before? I'm prepared to negotiate with them but also want to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot and cause them to raise the price on me. I would ideally like to not spend more than $2k but the domain is really perfect for my project so if we have to bite the bullet then we will...

EDIT: To add more context here, I have purchased the getPROJECTNAME.com and PROJECTNAMEapp.com domains for normal registrar prices. PROJECTNAME.io is also available for the normal price of about $60/yr. So it's not a make or break situation, but since we're in stealth mode for at least another 5 months, I don't want to launch and then all of a sudden face a $40,000 domain acquisition situation rather than a $4,000 one.

I have bought domains from them in the past.

I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and they may not have another buyer for years.

If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or whatever they have come down to.

IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for negotiation on those.

Awesome, thanks for the reply. Do you know of any way to find out if they're brokering the domain for someone or selling it themselves?

If you make a low enough offer that they can't accept, they will tell you and they have told me in the past that its because its below the sellers reserve. Whois may also give you a clue as to who owns the domain.

They have fairly decent margins for discounts - I used to get marketing emails offering 20%+ off prices in the past.

Just look at the whois. If the admin email is brokerage@buydomains.com, they own it.

Timing with them also can matter. Their sales people have quotas and goals for the month. You may get a better price towards the end of the month vs the beginning.

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