What does the $500,300 sale of Vacation.rentals tell us about .rental domains?

I’ll just skip right to the punchline here, the $500,300 sale of Vacation.rentals tells us absolutely nothing about the value or liquidity of .rental domain names. Now I don’t mean for this to come off harsh, I’m a big fan of Donuts and like a number of the TLDs that they have. That being said, I think it’s really important, especially for new Domainers, to not take this sale as a benchmark for similar names.

While this sale is definitely great news for .rentals, and does show that someone out there will pay half a million dollars for a .rental domain, the fact is, this tells us very little about the market because it is without a doubt, an outlier. Of course if by the end of this year we see 10 – 15 more .rental sales all in the same range then I’ll say, okay, there’s something here, but my guess is this will be the highest .rental sale of all time.

Below is a list of all the recorded .rentals sales that Namebio has on file as of this post:

dot-rental-domain-sales

If you do the math here, the average resale price of a .rentals domain excluding vacation.rentals is $660. So if you buy a .rentals name, or a bunch of them, don’t expect to make a six-figure sale, look at the numbers here and be realistic.

Now, like I said in the beginning of this post, I don’t want you to read this and think, wow – Morgan really doesn’t like .rentals. I have no problem with .rentals and as I said above, I really like Donuts, they are an inspirational company and I’m a HUGE fan of the people who work there. I’m happy for them as this sale his instantly put the .rentals into the limelight.

What I do want people to understand is that you shouldn’t base your investment decisions on sales like these. There are a lot of new domain investors out there that might read news like this and immediately start buying .rentals domains. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. Fast forward five years later and it’s entirely possible that you’re sitting on all the names you bought, paying renewals every year and wondering when your big pay day is going to come.

If you want to experiment, sure go ahead and buy a couple .rentals if you think you have the opportunity to buy a really premium name. Just remember, with new gTLDs it’s usually only the most premium names that sell, and even then you could be waiting 5 – 10 years to get the price that you want.

I personally am not buying any .rentals or really any new gTLDs for that matter, I’m sticking with .COM and a few .IO and .AI names here and there. What do you think? Does the vacation.rentals sale make you want to go buy a bunch of .rentals domains or are you like me and sticking to good old .COM.

I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton