How the heck did HVW.com sell for $12,000?

by Morgan on October 3, 2019

Lately I’ve seen a number of cases where people sell domains for well below market value. I get it, if you need money, you need money, so you sell for what you can get, but honestly sometimes I see a sale that just makes me scratch my head.

Such is the case with HVW.com which sold for $12,000. I discovered that sale thanks to Joe Styler who highlighted the sale on his Twitter account:

Now in case you didn’t know, three character .COMs like this typically sell for a lot more, heck Ice.com sold for $3.5M last year and NCC.com sold for $300,000 over the summer, so yes $12k is a screaming deal.

So what happened here? Did the buyer here get lucky? Did the seller set the reserve too low? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

{ 11 comments… add one }

Snoopy October 3, 2019, 9:10 pm

The market for this type of name has collapsed, I’d say prices are down 60%-70%. Prices have been flirting with 4 figures for quite a while, will be interesting to see if it eventually dips into that area or not.

The problem is few endusers and the prior market was a bubble pushed up by speculative Chinese buying. There was also the big Chinese firesale of these names a while ago (I think fuelled by borrowing) and that is probably still hanging over the market.

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- Samit October 5, 2019, 12:04 am
  
  So lll.coms are a loss leader for everyone who bought at 20k+, is that what you mean by .com or bust?
  
  The problem is that when you keep pushing a narrative and generalizing, you’re usually wrong.
  
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Ethan October 3, 2019, 10:00 pm

Form what I could remember since August 2018, these 3L .com have been sold for about $10K to $30K. Therefore I’m not surprised with a $12K sale.

The $3.5M Ice.com is a dictionary word domain so I would not use it as a comparison in this case.

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- Snoopy October 3, 2019, 10:28 pm
  
  Agree, stuff like ice.com, men.com, sex.com and ice.com isn’t genuinely in this category.
  
  Startups typically don’t want LLL.com because these names are hard to remember and aren’t very brandy or modern, and that leaves the older real world type companies as buyers, most of those companies settled with their domains long ago.
  
  Anyone who claims these names get a lot of interest in probably sitting on a pile of them, they don’t sell easily and the vast majority of interest is wholesale buyers.
  
  The sales are only lacklustre, typically 10-30k as you say, very rare for a lll.com to break 7 figs for example, only 2 examples in namebio over the last 20 years, dxl.com and qnb.com.
  When you factor in the 17k combinations the odds aren’t great and the very top end is typically 200-300k.
  
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Michael October 3, 2019, 11:42 pm

I sold that domain in 2007, it was the first LLL.com I ever owned. Glad I didn’t hold it all this time waiting for an end user. $12k is right around what I would expect it to wholesale for these days so I’m not sure why you’re so shocked, it’s not that uncommon for end users to get a wholesale price.

It was a decent buy in the sense that if their business doesn’t work out they should easily be able to liquidate it and not lose much, maybe even make a small profit. Most end users pay 10x+ the liquid value. But it was not a screaming deal other than that an end user paid wholesale. If you bought it yourself for that price it would have been a very *meh* deal.

And this domain is in no way comparable to Ice or NCC, I really hope you know that.

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Mark Thorpe October 4, 2019, 6:47 am

Wake up people, not every LLL domain is worth $50k+. Most are worth high 4 figures to low 5 figures.

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- Snoopy October 4, 2019, 5:26 pm
  
  The market is way down but not to that level! Lowest sale is $9999 that I know of.
  
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  - Mark Thorpe October 5, 2019, 1:53 pm
    
    HVW.com was sold to an end-user for $12k retail, not wholesale. So that’s in the 4-5 figure range.
    
    Reply
Anunt October 4, 2019, 3:51 pm

iyw. com sold for $11,100
ziz .com sold for $5000
zlz .com sold for $5000
xij .com sold for $9999
These are all recent sales within 3 months

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Snoopy October 4, 2019, 5:24 pm

The two $5,000 ones are an error, should be $25,000.

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Dom October 5, 2019, 1:10 am

East side ommon practice, tax-wax.

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