Efty reports that domain name purchase inquiries were down last month.
What’s happening to aftermarket domain name inquiries in the wake of the pandemic and asset market plunge?
For most people, it’s hard to look at their portfolio and draw any conclusions. But domain name sales platform Efty has a large dataset to start drawing some conclusions.
Efty says that inquiries were down 14.5% in March compared to February. It notes that traffic to for-sale landing pages was up, though; it was up 37% month-over-month. The company thinks this is because more of our daily lives have shifted online. It notes that internet usage is up 50% in some parts of the world.
(If your company has access to other relevant data to show the impact of the pandemic, please contact me at andrew (at) domainnamewire.com.)
Rob Monster - Epik.com says
From what I have seen, March has been a tale of two halves. The first half of the month was slow. As of this past weekend, a switch seems to have been flipped and inquiry volume is up strongly.
The big shift I am seeing is coming from startup entrepreneurs looking for names for new projects and new businesses. I would be surprised if others are not seeing this shift.
Looking ahead, the central banks and treasuries seem committed to currency debasement and inflation rather than deflationary collapse. I would expect rising demand for productive assets that map to a remote economy, and that would include many investment-grade domains.
Sure, it is a lousy time to be in commercial real estate, restaurant, traditional retail, etc, but it does not have to be all bad for those who position for the trend. This trend may take many months to work its way through, and those who are expecting to be back to their commute in April might be in for a rude awakening.
Hoping for the best, but for now, will be planning for a sustained trend of needing to empower a lot of remote workers. The people who are waiting for their governments to bail them out are the ones who are going to be left holding the drippy bag.
Doron Vermaat says
Thanks for sharing Rob.
I reported a 16% decrease in offers and inquiries in March vs February (in a comment on DomainInvesting.com) so at Efty we have also seen an uptick in the last week or so.
This can mean a few things, as overall traffic is way up, we’re seeing an influx of “confused” visitors, submitting an inquiry on a for-sale lander without having any intention to purchase the domain name whatsoever. I experience it in small numbers on MoralSupport.com, a domain name from my personal portfolio, but platform-wide we have many domains such as Govt.com or Fed.com which can drive high numbers of such “inquiries”.
Then, of course, there are the “wantrepreneurs” you are referring too. People who are often out of a job and have decided to now finally start with that project, charity or business they’ve always dreamed of. You could say these are buyers but we both know that the budgets that come with these inquiries are often small or nonexistent. You shared a perfect example of one of those inquiries in your Tweet on Monday in which you predicted ““a worldwide bull run on domains has started”.
As for that tweet, it seems there’s the difference between our companies. We share a dataset from an entire month, based on almost 4M visits while you decide to cherry-pick and make a bold statement based on what you’re seeing on a single day of the month. It’s great that you’re looking to give folks hope but we feel it’s more empowering if we help domain name investors take off those pink glasses and get prepared for what is undoubtedly going to a market in which we’re going to see a significantly lower sales volume.
joesaba2014 says
This that you see right now is what I respond to @Rick Schwartz in one of his Tweets.
Conoravirus is a speculative disease of the world stock market, it is also a great business for companies in the offer of the world market economy facing the Demand in consumption that makes supermarkets empty out of fear, Coronavirus.com year 2002, first coronavirus China 2002