Graen domain appraisal review: it’s fine, but not worth your time

This marketplace’s domain appraisal tool doesn’t offer a compelling reason to use it.

This is part of Domain Name Wire’s review of automated domain appraisal tools. See all reviews: Estibot, GoDaddy, Atom, Appraise.net, GoExpired, Dynadot, NameWorth, Saw, Appraise.software, Humbleworth.

Update: Since posting our review, Graen has gone dark. We’ve removed the link to the site in this review.

Graen is a confidential marketplace to sell high value domains.

It offers an instant domain appraisal tool that provides both short- and long-term price suggestions.

While these are couched as pricing suggestions, Graen calls it an appraisal tool, so we’re treating it that way.

For the purposes of this analysis, we looked at the long-term price suggestion.

In addition to the price suggestion, the appraisal displays the length, the number of TLDs the second level domain is registered under, and the total number of domains with the keyword.

Two word brandables

We evaluated two domain names in this category: MakeMatter.com, which sold for $15,000, and PressBridge.com, which sold for $5,000.

Both of these domains are in the sweet spot for two dictionary word brandables of $3,000-$15,000. Yes, some sellers hold out for higher amounts, and their data will show these domains sell for much more. But looking at overall sale data, it’s reasonable for an appraisal system to return anything in this price range for this type of domain.

Graen appraised MakeMatter.com for $3,615 and PressBridge.com for $9,477. Neither of these appraisals is particularly objectionable, and are within our $3k-$15k range for domains like these.

We ran our test unregistered domain, CloudToaster.com, through the system a couple of times. It returned an error, perhaps because it couldn’t pull the number of registrations in any TLDs.

One word, high value .com

Graen appraised Dragonfly.com at $180,000, which is well below what it sold for.

We also tried Midnight.com, which sold for $1.15 million this year, and it said it was worth $176,233.

The tool clearly struggles at the top end. It even appraised Money.com for under $700k.

Popular ccTLDs

We ran a solid one word .io, and a plural .ai of lesser quality through Atom’s appraisal tool.

Mike sold expedite.io for $14,995. Graen said it’s worth $8,258 long term.

We also valued kickers.ai, which Andrew sold for $8,000. Graen returned $8,235.

Many values on .io and .ai domains are in a close range. Even chat.ai appraised at under $100k.

Exact Match descriptive

Graen appraised WaterFilters.com at $41,340. That’s not far off from most of the tools we tested.

The seller is asking $3.5 million, but that’s just an asking price. Exact match domains like this have lost some of their luster, although this is a humongous market for ecommerce sales.

Three and four letter domains

Three and four letter domains are some of the most liquid domains on the market.

We tested a pronounceable CVCV .com domain, dujo.com, that is listed on Afternic for $36,000.

Our goal was to see if the algorithms caught that this was not just a random set of letters. Pronounceable, brandable four letter domains are generally worth more than unpronounceable random letters.

Graen appraised it at $54,038.

We also tested a four letter, non-pronounceable. Logan Flatt sold MOTG.com for $14,888. Graen said it’s worth $30,207.

Both of these are on the high side.

For a three letter domain, we tested VJN.com. It’s listed for sale on Afternic for $39,000. V and J aren’t great letters, so this is likely on the lower end of three letter .com values.

Graen priced it at $90,965. For a short-term listing price, Graen suggested about $26,000, which strikes us as fair.

New TLDs

New top level domains are very hard to value. There is very little sales data about most of them.

Andrew sold voicemail.app for $5,000 last year. It appraised for $7,217.

Mark Levine sold timber.homes for $2,899. Graen said it’s worth $17,142, which is very high for a .homes domain.

There’s little data about .homes — NameBio has only 24 sales with $4,320 at the highest — so this valuation seems like a wild guess.

Final analysis

Graen doesn’t offer anything that other appraisal services don’t offer. Some of its prices seemed fair, but overall, we don’t think there’s much here to convince people to use Graen’s appraisal tool.