Are domain investors missing great deals by focusing on buying expired domains?

One of my favorite domain investors on Twitter is a guy named Josh Reason (cool name right?). What I like about Josh is he’s always sharing what he’s doing, what he’s learning, and asking great questions along the way. Recently he announced the sale of MarketInsider.com for $7,910, a domain that he purchased for $700 a week earlier.

First, before you get too excited. Don’t take individual sales like these out of context. If all of us could just buy a domain for $700 and flip it for around $8k, we’d be doing it all day long and probably living on a pretty kick ass island, aptly called Domainer Island.

But we’re not, and we live in a slightly different world that’s still pretty darn cool IMO. Domain name investing offers incredible opportunities and I have been a huge proponent of two-word .COMs for a long time now because things like this can and do happen. That being said, you need to pick the right name and buy at the right price.

That’s exactly what Josh did here, MarketInsider.com is a really solid name and $700 is an absolute steal for the name IMO. I immediately assumed he bought the name off a drop…but it turns out he bought it retail, from a marketplace. Recently he shared a follow-up to this on Twitter that I thought was pretty interesting, heck – interesting enough to write a whole blog post about, here’s the Tweet:

Josh makes a great point in this tweet, and honestly it’s something I’m guilty of. I think for some reason I’ve assumed that domains for sales by private sellers on marketplaces must be priced for end-users. I’m not sure why I think that, I just do (or did) and me and many of you are probably missing out on some pretty awesome deals.

Yes, expired domains are great and I think they are and always will be one of the best ways for investors to get investment-grade names at wholesale pricing…that being said, there are a lot of eyes on expired domain auctions, especially the really good ones.

Names sitting out there on marketplaces like Go Daddy and Sedo with BIN prices, still get plenty of eyeballs, but likely less from domain investors. While this might not be groundbreaking to you in any way, it certainly has opened my eyes as I’ve been very focused on buying expired domains exclusively for some time now…I wonder what kind of deals I’ve missed over the years by not digging a little deeper into domains that other owners have listed for sale.

Thanks Josh, why didn’t I think of that? Well I’m even more happy to have you in my Twitterverse.

Now I’ll turn it over to you. Do you think we’re missing some great domain deals by putting so much focus on expired domains? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton