Four Active Inquiries on One Domain Name

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As they say, “when it rains, it pours.” I thought this was pretty cool and wanted to share it with you. It doesn’t happen very often, but I now have four ongoing inquiries for the EventManagement.com domain name via DomainNameSales.com.

Since two of the inquiries were made directly from the landing page, I am in direct talks with those two parties. Both have submitted opening offers, although we are pretty far away from the asking price. There are also two ongoing inquiries that were submitted via GoDaddy. This means I don’t know who the prospects are because they are negotiating and dealing directly with DNS brokers.

Negotiating with four parties at once on one domain name is new territory for me, and I am curious how you would proceed with your negotiations if you were in my shoes. I gave my asking price to the two prospects I am dealing with directly, and the brokers should have informed the other prospects about the asking price. Obviously, I have a bit of room to negotiate when I don’t have to pay a sales commission, but it’s a bit tricky to have four negotiations going on at the same time, especially when two of them are out of my control.

Have you had four live offers on a domain name at once? Do you have any tips for negotiating with four parties at the same time? This is obvious a good “problem” to have although, I don’t know if any of the prospects can pay the asking price.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

32 COMMENTS

  1. It’s a great name, no doubt.

    In a similar situation with two concurrent offers, I let the brokers manage the communication per my asking/minimum price. One buyer eventually backed out but both were made aware of the other’s offer prior. It’s good to let them know there is competition for a domain.

  2. I have never had this “problem” but have anticipated the potential ramifications of quoting a price to multiple parties on the same domain name. If you do outbound marketing, get a few “How much?” inquiries, reply to them and two or more say OK, you could have a legal issue to deal with. Theoretically you could tell any second or third response which agrees to a price quote that the domain had already been sold. But in a litigious society that might not work. So when I get these responses now I am adding a comment that we are marketing this name to several companies and that the communication (with the price quote) does not constitute an offer. Perhaps that stifles responses. Maybe another alternative would be to tell any second or third inquirer that you already have an interested party but what is their budget for the name? That way you don’t legally have an open offer to multiple parties.

    Another potential solution if you can qualify that you have real end users would be to tell the parties you will auction the name with an acceptable reserve from your vantage point. We have all seen at Namejet etc what can happen when two or more interested parties really want a name.

    • Generally speaking, the DNS brokers say something like “the offer is valid for seven days,” although it’s only valid if it hasn’t been sold to someone else. With one of a kind assets like domain names, I think people should understand that it’s only available until someone else buys it.

    • Leonard – good point about potential issues with price quotes in multiple responses. How do you think, could it be appropriate to add something like “this a non exclusive offer” or “non-binding offer” after the price quote? I also assume that this might stifle some further responses, so it’s interesting to find out the best way of communicating this point without adding the excessive uncertainty in the message.

  3. Take the closest, serious offer to your asking price. Or tell them you will private auction for 24 hours on a private thread on your site. Pre-qualify with deposits.

  4. Great problem.

    1. Give them all your highest buy it now price, first come, first served.

    2. Invite them to an ebay auction and start at your lowest price.

    Keep us posted 🙂

  5. Wow, problems, problems, problems.
    That’s what you get for owning good domain name’s.
    I’ll trade your problems for mine any day.

  6. Considering that EventBrite.com got 60 million in funding on March 13 I would forget about these inquiries and go straight after EventBrite’s marketing team. They would only use it as a redirect but they know keeping it away from someone else is to their advantage and will probably pay you a higher price for it now. Since the 60 million is brand new funding they will be more willing to deal now than any other time.

    http://www.crunchbase.com/company/eventbrite

  7. Buyers often go to godaddy, and direct type it as if it was available to register, then become impatient and go straight to the web page to inquire.

  8. Funny coincidence I just got back from Staples and on the way home decided I wanted to check availability of an events related domain without knowing this post was up here.

  9. Interesting- at the same time this happened to you, I’ve had two eventnoun names receive serious offers on the same day. I’ve had them both since 1999 and one of them hadn’t had an offer in years. Maybe there is something going on in the industry that we need to research further.

  10. Mine is MagicEventMarketing.com and i have got an offer last week as well.. did not get a reply back yet after my initial price quote *scratching my head now*

  11. Your smart enough to know that potential buyers search out anything related to this domain and their monitoring this thread, so you must think this is advantageous in the negotiation process, I on the other hand think it can backfire on you, If for example the consensus was that your asking too much, it becomes a huge disadvantage during the negotiation process.

    At any rate, I hope your successful in selling it for the price your asking.

    • This thread substantiates the avalanche of interest in this domain by a bunch of separate parties. That is what says a whole lot, and that is the big dose of reality the size of Mt. Everest. Anything negative someone wants to say about the domain means nothing because anyone can post anything for any (bad) reason. Even the ones trying to obtain this domain could try something like that. That too was one of the reasons why I left the domain forums to begin with. Appraisal threads – joke of the century. If someone doesn’t like you personally or has some other cutthroat reason they’ll lie all day long. You could post a $ x x x, x x x domain and someone like that will make it their goal to post $500 – $1,500 and pretend they actually believe it along with nice play acting. They may not always say “reg fee” just so they can appear as if they actually believe what they are posting, but forget about them posting anywhere near what they really believe the real value is either. All of that won’t have anything to do with “consensus,” of course, but only with liars, haters and cutthroats. I could even show you a domain that had a real bid in the $millions where some pulled that kind of nonsense in one of the appraisal “forums” if I wanted to, but not willing to do that now. So the main issue with “backfiring” is not about the real value of the domain, but how many liars, sociopaths and cutthroats you may encounter trying to downplay, downgrade and deny the real value of the domain.

    • Regardless if the appraisals are legit or not, the point I’m making is that any potential buyer can use low appraisals or negative comments about the domain as a bargaining chip during negotiations.

      It’s almost like when DNJournal posted a domain that I bought on Pool, I picked it up for $2000, not knowing DNJ posted the price on their site, Months later I had a electronic company wanting to purchase the name, my price was 10 times what I paid for it, and during the negotiations the buyer Googled the domain, pulled up DNJ’s posting of the sale and sent me the link.

      Example above is another reason why I disliked posting domains on forums or anywhere else, because most of them are indexed by Google…. When you negotiate, you don’t want to give the buyer any ammunition, a clean slate is always best IMO.

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