Unofficial results show nearly $750,000 in sales at domain auction.

[Update 9-24-08: According to a comment on Domain Name News, some of the results on the Proxibid system were inaccurate. The following names didn’t sell: ResearchLab(s).com, atriums.com, customboots.com, daytraders.com, catfood.com, cognacs.com. But lotterynumbers.com did sell. Domain Name News calculates the new unofficial tally as $681,850.] The results are in for the Rick Latona Auctions, LLC event at TRAFFIC this afternoon. My very unofficial tally is $734,050 with 42 domain names sold, based on results from the online interface at Proxibid. The median sales price was $5,050.

I’m not sure if this met Rick Latona’s expectations. Before the auction he commented on Domain Name Wire:

“Domains are still a safe investment but prices are definitely down. I’ve told everyone on my team that if we do 1 million in sales we would have done 3 million if the auction was last year.”

Clearly the $1 million number was just an example, but I’m guessing the goal was around there. More domains may sell after the official auction. Regardless, this is a heck of a showing for a first time auction and shows that Latona means business (if you have any doubts).

Many of the domain names sold below their actual reserve prices. Because the auction house owned many of the domains, it was able to be flexible with the reserve prices. This makes me wonder if the buyer of MCC.com, who placed the bid online, could have paid less than $195,000 had he bid in person.

Here are the domains in order of highest price paid. Please note that these are unofficial, and no deal is complete until the money is delivered.

MCC.com 195000
CountryClubs.com 85000
DayTraders.com 80000
EFS.com 55000
Nap.com 47500
Lisbon.net 32000
Spreadsheets.com 25000
SecurityAlarms.com 18000
Chew.com 16000
TruckRims.com 16000
CatFood.com 15000
ComputerBatteries.com 14000
BabyAnnouncements.com 13000
Cognacs.com 13000
Wines.net 13000
RentalCondos.com 11500
11.net 10000
OneHourPhoto.com 7000
GolfClubRepair.com 6500
BreastExamination.com 6000
Microbrewers.com 6000
PrinceEdward.com 4100
FrenchPerfumes.com 4000
HighFidelity.com 4000
ModelSchools.com 4000
Monopolies.com 4000
CustomBoats.com 3500
Atriums.com 3000
Coeds.net 3000
ResearchLabs(s).com 3000
Sugarless.com 3000
PostOfficeBox.com 2500
StockBuying.com 2300
MufflerRepairs.com 2250
PublicAuctions.com 1700
StockOrders.com 1500
ForexTickers.com 1100
ForexTicker.com 800
SecondaryLending.com 800
StockShare.com 400
StockOrder.com 300
StockShares.com 300

The last auction of the day is starting now at Aftermarket.com.

Sedo makes changes to domain listings pages.

Last month Sedo rolled out major enhancements to its domain listings. The domain sales and parking company just made a few more changes based on feedback from the domain community.

First, the Seller Activity Index represents 12 months of completed sales and is represented by a colored meter instead of stars. I like this change as stars seem to indicate how “good” something is, whereas this index is merely an indicator of someone’s activity level.

Also, the domain listings include one-click access to vital statistics about the domains, including incoming links and search engine rankings. This is an extension of data URLtrends has been providing to Sedo for some time.

In order to see some of the features, including details about the seller, you must be logged into your Sedo account.

Below is an example of “Meet the Seller” details including the Seller Activity Index. This is for one of the domains I have listed, so this is my profile.

Aftermarket.com auction premieres this afternoon in New York.

The Aftermarket.com domain name auction will kick off at 5 PM Eastern today at the TRAFFIC conference. Online bidding is available at Aftermarket.com and you must register your account in order to bid.

This is the first auction under the Aftermarket.com brand, but the team behind this auction has lots of live auction experience. Thought Convergence, parent company of Aftermarket.com, also owns Name Intelligence, which puts on the Domain Roundtable conferences and auctions. The auction platform from previous auctions was scrapped and a new one built from the ground up on DomainTools’ web site.

One feature I like is the ability to use proxy bids. Although common in online auctions, using a proxy during a live auction like this means slow typers don’t miss out on domains just because the action moves too fast.

The domains selected for this auction were selected on the basis that they have reserves that should leave profit margin for domain flippers. There are no domains with reserves over $100,000.

Of course I’m particularly found of Headcase.com ($4,000 reserve) and BrokerageAccount.com ($5,000 reserve) because I own them. I’ll be disappointed if they only sell at the reserves as I think there’s lots of room to make more on these. Headcase.com was registered way back in 1996 and has many potential uses. Just google “headcase” to see what I mean. And the term “brokerage account” brings up a slew of advertisers on Google. I think Off.com at $70,000 should sell if someone with deep pockets brings their wallet.

Because the online auction platform is new I suggest getting familiar with it prior to bidding.

Rick Latona ’s highly anticipated auction takes place in New York today.

Update: Here are the results.

Rick Latona Auctions, LLC’s first live auction will take place at the TRAFFIC conference in Brooklyn today. The auction goes live at 1:30 PM EDT today. Last night Moniker held the first of its two auctions, which was modestly successful but certainly didn’t quell fears about how much money people have to invest in domains right now.

But today the story will change, if early bidding for Rick Latona’s auction is any indication.

Online bidding is already active and a handful of domains have received bids and even met their reserves. I’m shocked to see that someone bid early on MCC.com, which shows the reserve met at $195,000. Also meeting their reserves:

TruckRims.com at $7,647
Wines.net at $7,250
BabyAnnouncements $5,750
Lisbon.net $11,765
Nap.com $47,059

The process for registering and getting approved to bid in the auction can take a little time, so don’t wait until the last minute to register if you are interested in participating.

Auction tally respectable, but definite signs of market weakness.

The first of four auctions at the TRAFFIC conference in New York has concluded. Moniker sold about $100,000 worth of domains, with the bulk of them in the $xxx to low $x,xxx range. The results were respectable, but definitely show that buyers are skittish right now.

The most expensive domain in the auction, CD.com, failed to meet its reserve of $176,480. Even if it had hit the reserve, that’s $100,000 less than the domain sold for at TRAFFIC two years ago. There were bids of up to $150,000, but don’t let anyone tell you that’s a sign of money left on the table: the buyer knew what the reserve price was and still bid $26,480 less than it.

Perhaps a bigger sign of weakness was in the lower-tier one word domains. These domains, such as staffed.com, hording.com, and educates.com, don’t have much value as parked domains and have awkward suffixes, but a year or two ago could have sold in the mid $x,xxx range. Tonight none of them sold for more than $1,200.

I think the best value in the auction was Absent.com at $1,600. There’s a big market for workplace absenteeism, and this is a great generic domain for one of the service providers in this area to use for marketing. I had my eye on this domain, but had technical difficulties logging into the auction and joined about 20 domains late. I think it had something to do with Firefox 3 (or caching therein) as I was able to log in using Internet Explorer.

The top sale was Men.org at $12,500. Guys.org sold for $9,420 last year.

Much like the stock market performance of the past couple days, it’s not like people have run for the hills. They’re just being a little more conservative. Hopefully bidders will let loose for the final three auctions.