NetRegistry buys into Au Domain Marketplace
NetRegistry has paid an undisclosed amount to become the joint owner and operator of the Australian domain name marketplace - www.netfleet.com.au.
Netfleet founder, David Lye, said that the investment should help to grow the marketplace, which already has over 10000 Au domain names listed for sale.
“We’ve both invested in a joint-venture company called NetAlliance Pty Ltd that now owns the marketplace and trades as Netfleet” he said.
Lye said that he was in the process of adding a significant chunk of the Au names currently on sale at www.nameseek.com.au
to also be listed at Netfleet.
“That’ll tip us over the ten thousand mark and make us clearly the biggest Au domain name marketplace in Australia” he said.
Lye said that, with NetRegistry’s help there were a number of exciting developments ahead for netfleet.com.au this year.
“We’ve worked hard at expanding the range of services” he said “such as the live auctions we’ve recently introduced.”
Lye said that it was fair to say that the relatively modest number of reported sales in the various Au marketplaces to date had been disappointing.
But he was also quick to point out that auDA’s decision to open up the Au domain space to secondary market in April last year had been a big surprise to everyone.
“What’s really holding the market back is excessively high price expectations from both buyers and sellers.
And that’s because of the lack of comparable price information.
Its hard to know what a Au domain is worth because there have been so few sold.
Its sort of like there had never been a housing market and suddenly it became legal to sell them.
Do you sell them for what they cost to build, or for what you think they are worth.
Or what houses are worth in another county? Its so hard to know unless you’ve got something to compare with.”
Certainly that appears to be a problem in the Australian marketplace at the moment.
There are so few sales with which to compare that domain name owners are still comparing with prices paid for global domain names in the US market.
Realistically, those US prices should be discounted by 1/100th reflecting the relative sizes of the two markets.
But with so few Au sales reported to date, sellers are still targeting million dollar prices for Au domain names.
Buyers, however, aren’t so stupid that they’ll pay anything like that.
PWC.com.au, an obviously valuable name to consulting firm - price waterhouse coopers, attracted the highest price at netfleet.com.au
amongst names actually sold, going for $10,450.
Higher prices have been paid for a small number of geographic names at Melbourne Au domain name marketplace -
www.domaintradingpost.com.au
(now www.domainmarketplace.com.au), with reid.com.au going for $14,300 and forster.com.au going for $11,000.
But the highest price for an Au domain names last year was actually seen at an auction held as part of the TRAFFIC professional domainers conference
held on the Gold Coast in November.
After converting the $US dollar price into Au dollars and adding 10% for GST jeweller.com.au was sold for $14,677.
History.com.au went for $13,644 at the same auction. And the total dollar amount of for the 33 different Au domain names sold at
this event was just on $130,000.
So whilst Au domain names aren’t yet making anyone a millionaire, there is still clearly considerable potential.
Larry Bloch, CEO of NetRegistry, clearly agrees.
“We see significant growth in this area. Currently our efforts are focussed on education as much as anything – most people do not even realise that domain names are now tradeable assets.
So it’s a question of creating the industry as well as satisfying the demand.”
For more information go to
www.netfleet.com.au
www.netregistry.com.au
www.nameseek.com.au
www.domainmarketplace.com.au
www.domainshed.com.au
www.auda.org.au
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