So lately 99.9% of the news coming out of the UK has been about one topic – Brexit. While this is a hot topic for good reason, there’s another event taking place that I think most people will miss, but could turn into a major opportunity for some people.
We all know that buying a house in London is expensive, damn expensive, like, makes San Francisco looks like a deal kind of expensive. But what about digital real estate in England?
Here’s what’s happening and where there “might” be an opportunity for some domain investors.
- The .UK extension was recently made available to existing registrants of Englands primary domain extension .co.uk
- This was a time-limited offer for people who already owned matching .CO.UK domains, and, well, time’s up
- Any domains that weren’t claimed are going to auction, here’s the scoop from NameJet:
These .UK domain names have been held in reserve by the registry on behalf of .CO.UK registrants allow them to register their corresponding .UK domain name. The window to exercise that right has expired.
This creates a one-time-only opportunity to acquire these potentially high-value .UK names in the drop.
Our partner, SnapNames, is currently taking backorders for these 1.8 millionnames and will facilitate auctions on names that they catch in the drop with multiple backorders.(Source – NameJet)
You can download the full list of 1.8M domains that are going to auction or search using the same link.
Now back to the potential investment opportunity. I’ll be the first to tell you that I have no clue if any of these domains would be good investments. I’ve never been a big ccTLD investor nor do I understand the dynamics of the UK domain market. On top of that, I don’t know how many people will want to buy .UK domains, especially if there’s an existing, already well-known business running on the corresponding .CO.UK
What I do know is that there are very likely some real diamonds in there, finding them will probably require quite a bit of research and maybe getting some advice from someone who knows the market better.
My first step will be to talk to someone in the UK that has invested in domains to get their take on it. Then I’ll take it from there. That being said, and like the title of my post says, this could be the best time to buy digital real estate in the UK, or the best time in a long time.
What do you think? Is there an opportunity here? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!
