Domain seller asks for $2,500 to keep sale private

Private Domain Sale

Well here’s an interesting one. Today Domain Investor Arif Sengoren shared a little background on a recent domain acquisition he made on behalf of a client. They bought a domain for $6,500 which was originally priced at $9k and asked the seller if they’d be okay keeping the sale private, the seller’s response? Sure – but it’ll cost you $2,500.

Feel free to click on this tweet to read the whole thread but this is a tricky one to analyze. As you’ll see from the tweet, the seller did reduce their price by $2,500 since the name was originally priced at $9k. So it’s not the case that this particular seller always charges $2.5k to sign an NDA, instead they’re really saying – if you wanted the sale private you should have paid full price.

Josh Reason and others jumped in the thread to share their thoughts, here are some highlights:

I think what Keith said, is probably what was going through the sellers head, “if you had paid full price I would have given you whatever you wanted but a discounted price doesn’t come with special favors.”

At the same time I have to say, for myself, if I was the seller, I probably would have been fine with keeping the sale private and wouldn’t ask for $2.5k. My thinking here is that I’d rather just be an easy person to work with and encourage someone to do business with me again in the future. If this was a landmark sale that I really wanted to hang my hat on, maybe I’d fight to keep it public, but at $6.5k it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

What would you have done in this situation?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton