Behind the Sale: SmartCompanion.com – from $475 purchase to $9,940 sale

Welcome to the eight post in our Behind the Sale series on the Efty blog. In this series, I talk with domain name investors who share all the details behind a recent sale. You will learn how they bought low and sold high, how the negotiations went down and much more.

Today, I am chatting with Alex Bates a full-time domain name investor based in the United Kingdom. He’s the founder of Domainexus.com.

Alex, tell me a little bit about yourself.

I hand-registered a handful of domains in 2015 and forgot about them until I was contacted by a GoDaddy broker earlier this year regarding one of them. Long story short, that sale never materialized (at least not yet), but it got me interested in domaining. I would say I have been domaining full-time for the past 6 months now. A lot of that has been a huge learning curve, but I would say that I am getting the hang of things a little better now. I am approaching 200 domains, a large chunk are brandables, but I am speculating a little with Crypto related names.

What is the domain name that you’ve sold?

I sold SmartCompanion.com after receiving an offer through its Efty landing page. My default landing page theme is UDRP Safe for all new domains added until I tailor things specifically for each domain.

How much did you pay for the domain and how much did it sell for? 

This domain was purchased at Snapnames auction in August for $475 and an agreement for the sale of the domain was reached in October for just shy of $10,000. I received the funds in November.

Can you share how the negotiations for this domain name went down? 

Originally the buying company which shares the same domain name but in .CA used a third party to ask whether the domain was for sale (it was still quite clear who the buyer actually was though using Efty’s logged information such as the buyer’s IP address and Google). I quoted a higher price than the sale price and they said that it was too expensive with their budget being under $10k. At this stage, they still hadn’t made any offer other than asking how much it was. I stated that I was in no rush to sell as the name was being used a lot already within the robotics industry. I felt that dealing with this third party wasn’t getting the deal any closer, so I decided to reach out the CEO of the company that this person was acting on behalf and state that if they were serious about making an offer for the name then they should do it directly. About a month later they finally got back to me and we settled on 7,500 GBP. I would say that we both walked away happy, it was a nice quick flip from my end and a good price for the buyer. We used Payoneer Escrow to finalize the transaction as they offer GBP currency payments.

Thanks for sharing Alex, is there anything else you like to add? 

I can be contacted by email at [email protected]. I am interested in both purchasing and brokering domain names, so please get in touch if you have something interesting.

Do you have a noticeable domain name sale that you would like to share? Drop me an email at [email protected] as I would love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: Efty does not have access to user’s sales data. We, therefore only share information on sales that have been publicly reported. Read our full governance here.