Behind the Sale: BeaverSwap.com – from $6.99 purchase to $2,500 sale

Welcome to the 15th post in our Behind the Sale series on the Efty blog. In this series, I talk with domain name investors who share the details behind a recent sale. You will learn how they bought low and sold high, how the negotiations went down and much more.

Today is a little different, as I’ll be sharing the details behind a recent sale from my own portfolio of domains.

A little bit about myself.

As many of you know, Efty Investor was co-founded by me to help me boost sales and keep track of my performance after I started my journey as a domain name investor in 2013. I have been eating my own dog food ever since and the majority of my inquiries and sales come through my Efty For-Sale landing pages. During the first years, I had a strong focus on brandable .com domain names and build a profitable portfolio in this niche. I talked about these early years in a DomainSherpa interview with Michael Cyger called “$40K Annual Profit from Part-time Brandable Domain Name Investing“.

I started to diversify my portfolio after meeting with fellow investor Nikul Sanghvi at NamesCon in 2018 and added many .co and .io domains to the portfolio since then. This paid off and in 2020 I had my first six-figure year as a domain name investor. I shared a lot about my investment strategy in alternative extensions and discuss domain sales from that year on this Brandable Insider podcast episode with Keith deBoer.

What is the domain name that sold?

I sold BeaverSwap.com on June 15, 2021, via Efty’s brokerage integration with Saw.com

How much did I pay for the domain and how much did it sell for? 

I hand registered BeaverSwap.com on the 10th of May this year for $6.99 during a promotion at Dynadot. At the same time, I registered an additional 66 Animal+Swap.com domain names. The reason behind these registrations was that I saw a trend emerge in DeFi (decentralized finance) in which companies that facilitate automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens often named themselves after popular animals or food followed by the word Swap. Some examples of these are UniSwap and SushiSwap.

I sold the BeaverSwap.com domain name just 35 days later for $2,500

How did the negotiations for this domain name go down?

I usually do not price any domains for the first couple of months of ownership so BeaverSwap.com was listed on Efty.com as Make an Offer. On the 10th of June, I received a $500 offer from an individual with a Swedish IP address with the message field being left blank. I emailed the buyer with a $3,750 asking price but did not hear anything back from them for four days, despite another follow-up.

This is when I decided to assign the lead to a Saw.com broker team via Efty’s brokerage integration. The way this works is that you set a Target (your asking price) and a Floor (minimum price you like to sell the domain for) and add an optional note with information for the broker.

My lead was assigned to Paul Thomson and the next day Paul informed me via email that he had the buyer confirmed at $2,500 which was $500 more than my floor price. The transaction of the domain was handled through Escrow.com and was completed within 3 days. A 15% broker commission was paid on the sale so my net was $2,125

The two things I’ve learned from this sale is that there still is money to be made in hand registering domain names if you manage to get in on a new trend early, and that in some cases a professional domain broker can do a better job than yourself in getting through to a buyer and closing the deal quickly.