Have you ever felt you were not being listened to? I have this week, it’s almost laughable at how little emails must be getting read and yet they get replied to.

I was doing some digging for domains owned by companies in administration or liquidation looking for a bargain as you do, I found shelving.co.uk owned by Dexion Ltd, if you check at companies house for Dexion Ltd it shows as STATUS: Administrative Receiver

So often from here it’s a case of approaching the administrator but the domain still works and the company seems to be trading so I thought I’d contact them:

Sent 23rd September

I am interested in the domain name shelving.co.uk which is not in use, I would be prepared to pay £500 plus associated transfer fee

If you could please let me know either way I would appreciate your time.

In a timely manner a received a reply that makes it look like they have confused me with a potential customer to buy shelving, not sure how as my email seemed straight forward enough, they replied saying

 

Thank you for your enquiry.

For me to be able to process your enquiry please can you provide me with further details: – The project address (including postcode)? What would the shelving be used to store?

Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me. 

Perhaps it’s a standard reply, I don’t want shelving I want the domain name..sheesh!, so I persevere, I have learnt to do that if nothing else

I think we are at cross purposes, I enclose my address for info however I am interested in the shelving domain name which your company owns but does not use. http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=shelving.co.uk

That should make things a bit clearer!

 

Thank you for your enquiry. I apologise for the delay in responding to you we have experienced an IT issue with my email recently which has caused this.

We generally operate via a network of Dexion approved storage centres located throughout the UK. The local distributor for your area is as detailed below:

Modul 8 Unit 1 Craigshaw Commercial Park Craigshaw Drive ABERDEEN AB12 3BE

Your details have been forwarded to the above Company and somebody should be in contact with you shortly.

I trust this is of some assistance but should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Hmm, they seemed determined to ignore my email and treat me as if I am asking about shelving rather than their business asset, I wonder how they managed to get into so much difficulty as a business?

Whoah, a roller coaster of a deal for me has finally…finally …finally been closed and this one was far from luck!

Since I managed to buy Tvs.co.uk I have held off doing anything with it, I have been trying to buy PCs.co.uk to go along side it and develop them both along the same format.

If your bored and have spare time you can read about the start of my adventure here.
Basically the domain PCs.co.uk was owned by a company in administration.
I contacted them and offered £3500 (enough to make it worth my while and not too little that they dismiss it) well they accepted my offer and I paid them and waited 4 weeks with no transfer, they confirmed the transfer documents were completed awaiting to be signed, then suddenly the deal collapsed in May this year.

It turned out that they didn’t own the domain, they had sold goodwill and intangible assets last November! I was more than gutted, I had them for breach of contract but that was of no real use to me, I didn’t want money I wanted the domain so I laid it on thick that I was out of pocket and managed to get a hold of the new owners details.

Months of tumbleweeds came to pass, I sent over 12 emails with no reply to the new owners, I also sent a recorded delivery letter, no reply. Suddenly out of the blue I got a reply to one of my emails saying they would consider £5k instead of the £3500 I had previously (thought I had) bought it for.

YES! I replied saying I would pay £5000 and to please invoice me or give me bank details.
No reply….. another 2 weeks pass and no reply to 4 emails.

Then I get an email with bank details in reply to my 5th email …
YES! so I CHAPS £5k to him hoping we could do the deal that afternoon, a week passes with no reply.

Suddenly out of the blue I get a phone call saying they will transfer it to me the next afternoon, and finally today the deal has been completed after 7 long months, this has been really tough with many highs and lows and a real lesson in how a deal is not done until it’s fully completed, I feel a bit washed out with it to be honest, so many times excited thinking lighting can’t strike twice!? TVs for £1k and PCs for £5k, nah surely not. Every day, week and month has seemed really long whenever my mind came back to this domain.

Out of curiosity again I decided to get a SEDO valuation, they peg PCs at £30,000 in value against TVs.co.uk being £22k, maybe influenced by better like for like sales this year, who knows, who cares it’s finally in the bag, I’m knackered.

March 2007 bought a .co.uk domain that I first saw posted on Acorn, the domain in question can be seen here. Bought for around $700.

There was a famous Scottish footballer called this and around March last year I was less focused, buying any .co.uk domain names that seemed good value rather than one’s I can develop out, so I bought it.

Just completed the sale of the domain through Escrow with the buyer paying the fees.

The buyer sent me a UPS letter from America to enquire if it was for sale and my asking price, I did a bit of research and the buyer seemed genuine, I also checked and confirmed they owned the .com version of the domain, that was good news confirming for me their interest was genuine.

Next was to do some research and I found the .com version previously listed for sale on DNForum, I contacted the previous owner to see what he sold it for, he was kind enough to let me know he sold it for $20k, nice sale. Still not sure how this would compare to the value of a .co.uk

I replied to the registered letter to say I wasn’t actively looking to sell the domain however if a suitable offer was made I would give it due consideration, if I had to put a price I’m not sure what I would have went with, no matter, a few hours later he got back and offered $10,000.

Now there’s a time to haggle and a time to deal, sure I could have countered and got more or countered and lost out completely, I decided to deal and Escrow has just been completed, $10,000 …kerching

The lesson I learnt here was for once it was a much better strategy to let the prospective buyer come with a suitable offer as a starting point, it may just be higher than your target price.

I am still learning everyday about domains, dropcatching & developing. At some point I’ll probably do a post that details the process to catching UK domains, costs and what’s involved but for now I’ll just share my main thoughts on what I’ve learnt generally on domaining and specifically the .co.uk extension.

1. If you want to rank in Google.co.uk (which is much easier to do than .com) you really do need to get a .co.uk  …. simple as that, I know you can throw 100 examples of good ranking info’s com’s net’s and org’s but in my experience it makes life so much easier. Yes webmaster central lets you specify that your domain/site is UK targeted but again in my experience that’s about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest, get the country specific domain if your outside the US.

2. Not all one word domains are valuable or the holy grail, doesn’t matter what extension we are talking about. I’d much rather have a 2 word product domain like patiofurniture.co.uk than a one word domain like curved.co.uk

3. Domains need to serve a purpose and they are generally only worth something if there is either a clear development opportunity for them in a brandable way, so something like sailingworld.co.uk works for me as very brandable and describes itself well, or if they are keyword rich and searched for like Genes.co.uk, domains like pissypants.co.uk or shoeshere.co.uk are worth zero, if you add two or three dictionary words together that does not an excellent domain make, not to say you couldn’t develop them to build traffic and add value but as a domain with nothing else value =£0

(more…)

As mentioned earlier in the week I am now registered with Nominet and have my own TAG which cost £587.50 to setup and then £100+VAT per year, as a registrar I can register domains directly with Nominet making them slightly cheaper, it also gives me access to their DAC (domain availability checker) and with a TAG it means I can query/check and try and register domains that have not been renewed or have been cancelled.

This improves my chances of getting a nice one word domain for £5, some interesting things to know about the DAC are:

The DAC is limited to four simultaneous connections per member, or group of related members.
Queries can be sent to the DAC without waiting for the previous query to return. 
The DAC will just queue the queries.
The maximum query rate is 1,000 queries per rolling 60 seconds recalculated every 5 seconds and a maximum of 432,000 per rolling 24 hours, recalculated every five minutes.
If you exceed the query limits a block will be imposed.

There are so many people trying for the same names some using techniques or judgement to try and improve their chances by using their allocation at certain times of the day, still looks like a bit of a lottery. Yesterday there was an LLL.co.uk which dropped early, the only other decent domain I knew of that I was interested in I managed to register, my first catch on the drop! …

‘Happy days dad’ as my son would say
A nice one word domain that describes a manner of things, a period in time, furniture, good name for a hotel or organisation. Possibly the only decent domain I’ll ever catch but the governed board of elected gods were smiling on me yesterday and in that millisecond made sure my fees to date have been more than covered.

While scanning through lists of expired/expiring UK domains you get a real insight into the weird and wonderful thought processes some people go through when registering domains, the list below details some of the real domains that had been registered 2 years ago and now are coming up for renewal and for some reason are not being renewed.. go figure

shampoodirectory.co.uk – What? I have seen some weak directory ideas in my time but a shampoo directory?
tarmactraining.co.uk – I think this was always going to be a long road
carphonewhorehouse.co.uk – made me laugh
libraryshelving.co.uk – now that’s what I call a small niche market
ediblelandscapes.co.uk – your telling me this business idea never worked out?
planmydeath.co.uk – ooh morbid one
concretefurniture.co.uk – I’d hate to see their delivery charges!
datemywife.co.uk – I’d rather not
yourleisure.co.uk  – Is my pleasure..Trainspotting
ediblephotos.co.uk – this one didn’t take of either?
divorceplanner.co.uk – you know what they say, fail to plan and you plan to fail
antiquesdotcom.co.uk – hmm now that would suffer in the radio test wouldn’t it
bodypartsdirect.co.uk – I’m sure the NHS could have done with this service
ducksnuts.co.uk – {shrug}
talktothepaw.co.uk – sometimes the hand isn’t enough
okaysions.co.uk – almost quite clever in a way, but no.

There are hundreds of expiring UK domains each day and the better one’s are competed for by a large number of people, you can still get some nice brandable names and 2 word products can be caught using drop catchers.

I joined Nominet at the end of last week, by becoming a registrar I can renew my .co.uk’s for £5+VAT each saving £1 per domain.

Some of the better domains that have expired and dropped in the last week or so are:
gemworld.co.uk
ruth.co.uk
studentscene.co.uk
sonnet.co.uk
invernesscity.co.uk
eyelasersurgery.co.uk
xpresstravel.co.uk
resurrection.co.uk
moneyadviser.co.uk
carmobility.co.uk
businessbuilder.co.uk
marineply.co.uk
defined.co.uk
beautygifts.co.uk
childinvestment.co.uk
glean.co.uk

A massive .co.uk domain sold with funds being transferred today, Phones.co.uk sold for £175,000 , yes that’s GBP which is about $344,364 USD, so congrats to James on the sale and it being made public.

A great flip really seeing as it was purchased in November for £49,500.

What a load of rubbish there has been posting around the net over the last day or so about the proposed opening up of the domain space, in case you are unaware ICANN are in the later stages of opening up top level domains which have been restricted to mainly .com .net and geo countries like .UK

The new proposal would allow anyone to submit their own subject to a stringent vetting process, so you could have .love or .hate

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7468855.stm

Individuals will be able to register a domain based on their own name, or any other string of letters, as long as they can show a “business plan and technical capacity”.

While companies will be able to secure domain names based on their intellectual property easily, some domain names could become subject to contention and a bidding war.

Dr Twomey said: “If there is a dispute, we will try and get the parties together to work it out. But if that fails there will be an auction and the domain will go to the highest bidder.”

There are numerous threads on the main domaining forums which for a large part totally miss the point, perhaps it is to be expected, domainers are not exactly going to be in favour of opening up the internet and many are saying it will increase the branding and desirability of .co.uk & .com which I agree with but saying that this new opening up of domains will fail is a bit short sighted.

You can catch some of the discussions here:
Namepros
Acorn
DNForum
DNState

Would Apple or Coke give up apple.com or coke.com?
Of course not, but surely you can see that if your a Mac fan and either free as a promotion or for a low yearly fee you could have yourname.mac as a domain for a website & email that would be attractive, just like Ebay and many other large companies would want to own their own domain extension.

It’s pointless, spammers and squatters will just dilute the masses of new tld’s
It has been stated that there is a strict vetting process, trademarks will be protected and more then that you need to demonstrate the ability to run a domain extension and show a business plan, there is also the likelihood of a large up front fee which could be tens of thousands so that clearly puts it out of reach of the average spammer, you need a clear business plan and a large wallet to pull it off.

There are already other extensions and they have failed like .biz  .eu
Granted there are a lot of poor extensions that have had varying success but this to me looks like an excellent opportunity for the right people with the right business plan.

Imagine owning .insurance

car.insurance / auto.insurance
home.insurance
pet.insurance
buildings.insurance
contens.insurance

Some high value domains there, or go for the wider audience with .hotel
How many hotels are there in the world?

Before I leased out my second domain I had sent out a fair batch of emails to likely companies looking to flip the domain for a good price, bought for £450 I was looking for something in the £2000 kind of price range which would give a nice profit, it was not a domain on the development list.

I keep going back to leasing because it seems the most attractive and sensible option to me for a market where it becomes increasingly difficult to replace any domains you buy and subsequently sell.

Buying a domain for £450 and selling it for around £2000 would on the face of it look like a good deal, however I have now leased the domain out, I leased it to a company heavily involved in the keyword market and they were happy to pay £75 per month on a 3 year lease.

Funnily enough I just heard back from one of the emails I sent 2 months ago, a company is now interested in buying the domain, they have offered the £2000 I was looking for, but after leasing the domain out what is the true value of that domain now?

Domains are not easy to value, almost impossible, you can only deal with the facts.
The fact was 2 months ago I might have sold that domain for £2000
Today the domain is on a 3 year lease worth £2700 and at the end of which I will still own the domain and it will likely be renewed for £4000 over the 3 years after that, at the end of which I will still own the domain.

That shows the true value of domain leasing, it can turn a £2000 asset bought for £450 into one worth £10,000 overnight.