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Purchasing a registered domain

Does anyone have any experience or advice on purchasing an already registered domain?

The domain I am interested in is parked with Go Daddy and does not have any contact info in the Whois search. Go Daddy has a brokerage service which charges $69 + 20% but I am a little leery of using them. If I can get it for a reasonable price and there is not much hassle then I'll go for it but figured I'd tap into the experts here and see what you think.

#tech-questions

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    Not sure if it is poor form to reply to my original post but since people are interested, I will give everyone a quick update.

    I did exchange emails with the owner of the domain and he offered to sell it to me for a staggering sum of money :) In his email he referenced this site - https://namebio.com/ which shows historical amounts paid for domain purchases.

    Using that site I searched for sites with similar names and responded politely with a rate similar to what other domains are going for. We are very far apart so I'm not sure it will happen. I do think he is hoping to strike gold with a big company that really wants the domain.

    I did go ahead and reserve some domains that were similar so I have a backup plan if it falls through.

    I will keep you informed. Thanks for everyone's feedback and interest.

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      Thanks for the update!! Just out of curiosity, approximately how much was he offering as a price?

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        Let's just say that he could buy a brand new 2019 Ford F150 Super Crew truck with the money he was asking for. Crazy.

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          ugh, that's way too expensive. On the contrary, a friend of mine was asked by the domain owner to give up some equity. Even after my friend offered $10-20k cash. I hope you can find another good domain soon!

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    I've used https://domainagents.com/ in the past, though, the owner came back with a ridiculous offer so I ended up renaming the project. It costs something like $20 to get in contact with the owner.

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    Send an email to the masked email on the whois record. It may get redirected to them anyway.

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      Interestingly enough I just went back and looked at the Whois record and noticed that there was an embedded link to a Go Daddy page. When I went directly to that link, I was able to see some legit (I think) contact info. I am going to try that route as well.

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    I have some experience buying registered domains (bought ~30 last year).

    1. With GDPR it's very hard nowadays to find out who is the owner, most of the brokers are relying on webarchive (there is a chance you can find contact details there), Linkedin, Crunchbase, pre-gdpr snapshots of the whois db (I personally didn't managed to get one), etc.
    2. There is no magic: all the brokers are doing the following: 1. writing an email, 2. making a call, 3. sending a letter via snailmail. No one is going to send a person to the address for $69 , but you can do it yourself.
    3. Well thought-through message (with research about the domain history, appraisals, etc) with an attractive offer is the key
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      Thank you for the feedback. As far as I can tell this domain has never been used for anything. I have tried to track down any instance of the domain being used and can not find anything.

      Since the landing page is a Go Daddy domain squatting page, I figured I would try and see if they could make the contact.

      I have low hopes but figured I would give it a shot. I will let everyone know if I get lucky! Thanks.

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        Agree, if it's parked with GoDaddy they are most probably have the owner's contacts.

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    Also interested - I've also been trying to buy a domain for a while.
    Based on my limited research about Go Daddy's brokerage service, it's nothing more than their employee doing the exact same thing that you'd be doing if you contacted the domain owner yourself. Do they have more leverage than I do as a negotiator?! TBH I kind of doubt it.

    I'd love to hear someone's experience.

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