The Balance Between Being Reasonable and Being Greedy

I was having an intense call with one of our potential clients yesterday. The person I was talking with represents one of the biggest corporations in Turkiye and they now consider acquiring their exact match domain with .com (rather than .com.tr). Since it was quite a long conversation and we were going through lots of things, including my career, I wanted to take a quick look at my blog to see my last post. Whoa! Then I realized it’s been quite a while since I posted here so, today, as a first thing, I’m writing this post.

For those who don’t know about me, I’ve been in the domain business since 2010 and worked almost every aspect of domain business. I’ve witnessed lots of things during these years but since the beginning or 2024 I’ve realized an increasing trend of something weird or interesting. I believe the exact word for this trend is “greed”. Greed of the buyers, sellers and even brokers, unfortunately.

The number of domain investors, buyers, sellers and brokers have been increasing day by day. Well, that brings some ups and downs to the stage. There are now way more people and companies who understand the value of domains, not just the money-wise, but also branding and investment-wise. On the other hand, there are a lot of misinformation ,especially in the X (formerly Twitter), including unconfirmed sales, made up conversations, deals, acquisitions, and etc. These may easily manipulate others (especially newcomers who have limited knowledge about domains) who follow/read them. In the end, this lack of knowledge and manipulation mostly transforms into the greed and, losing deals.

I’ve experienced countless negotiations where mostly the seller (A few times the broker) started with a price, then doubled (sometimes tripled) the price, negotiation failed and after a few months, came back with the lower price than I was initially quoted.

Here is an example, March 2024, I contacted the owner of a domain and the owner came back with $35K asking price, the budget I had was around $20K and after back and forth negotiations, we couldn’t make a deal. This is the nature of any business that includes negotiations. Sometimes you make a deal, sometimes you don’t. After a few weeks, I was informed that the price will be $50K. I was no longer interested at that time. And then, after a few months, I was informed that the price will be $100K. Well, it’s your domain, you can price it for $1 or $1M.

However, like a few months ago, I got contacted by this guy and guess what? The price dropped to $50K. It didn’t stop there. 2 days ago, I was told that they are ready to make a deal at $25K. I don’t know what happened. Maybe the owner needs some cash, maybe he thought that he made mistake, maybe he had another potential buyer and he thought they could pay more. But come on man! This doesn’t help anyone. A year ago, I was ready to make a deal at that price but look what happened now! We acquired another domain for our client, the owner lost $25K, a year, and your credibility, and one year of renewal.

I understand sellers’ point of view until one point. Yes, every single domain is unique. However, most of the time (I’d say more than 90%, maybe even 95%), there are alternatives — and buyers really don’t like the feeling of being fooled. Yes, that’s how buyers often feel. And I know, there have also been negotiations that followed the same path and eventually turned into deals. But personally, I don’t think that’s how business should be done — or how deals should be handled unless you’re ready to lose deals and more importantly, your credibility.

So, before being greedy, maybe you should think if the domain in case is REALLY unique and unbeatable, also consider your cash flow is ready to handle such ups and downs. Feel free to share what you think about the similar situations and if you experienced similar negotiations and what happened in the end.