Mike Mann has been reporting some very impressive domain name sales the last few days on his Facebook page
Mike just announced today he sold the domain name MissCandy.com for $30,000 a domain he purchase on July 30th 2012 for $75
Last week Mike reported selling Jazz.co for $22,000 a domain he purchased on July 19th 2010 as well as the domain TakeTheChance.com for $15,000 which he purchased on August 1, 2013 for $300
The previous week Mike announced the sale of CityMarkets.com for $9,000 a domain has acquired on October 10, 2011 for just $230.
So although Mike did not mention the acquisition cost of Jazz.co, I’ll assume back in 2010 it was pretty minimal, making it a total of $76,000 in domain name sales against a cost of under $750.
Congrats.
These results are only half of the story. What are his holding costs for the tens of other domain names that he purchased at the same time that have not sold yet?
these type of guys, keep the domain market moving otherwise it would have become static with Castello Bros. like
His sales are impressive, and those are the fixed prices of $30,000, $45,000 etc.. that he places on his website.
It is fair to educate some who are not aware of the hundreds of thousands of lost dollars spent on renewals renewing that massive portfolio, that does not generate any parking income. Also the staff, and the constant people who are emailing out, trying to get leads going etc…
For the quality of names, those are by far great achieved prices, but the $75K, on $750 is not simply that easy.
Wasn’t some of the .co names provided in a grandfather type clause, as he had some good early .co sales, which are not as hot as they were in the first few years.
There was an article months ago interviewing him and he was saying how he is domain poor or something to that effect because of renewal costs. These sales are not very impressive, it would be impressive if he had a portfolio of 500 or 1,000 domain names and he was reporting these sales.
Congratulations to MM. Nice job !!
You have to think about selling domains like a baseball game. Sometimes, you hit a single or double or triple. And, sometimes you hit a homerun. Sometimes you strike out. The important thing is , you need to step up to the plate to have any success. Mike is always buying and selling. Good for him.
Anyone that knows or follows Mike Mann knows, he is always thinking, moving, and taking action. I don’t know if it has changed in the past couple years but he use to function like this with very little sleep.
I wish Mike and ALL OF US success in the future.
Nice job by Mr Mann but what is really impressive-the Castello brothers turning down $5million for PalmSprings.com or selling Whiskey.com for $3million while only hold a very small portfolio of domain names. That’s impressive-and if you email them-they get right back to you. No wonder they’ve made so much money.
Castello Bros. are also a class act. But, focusing on a different business strategy than Mann. Castello’s believe in owning a small portfolio of super prime domains and developing them. Whereas, Mann believes in owning a large portfolio (yes, a big nut) and moving inventory at premium prices when he can. (Just like Berkens and others) Buy low, sell high. Both are successful strategies.
As Ron Jackson often states, there are a lot of great people that are a pleasure to know in the domain category.
The guy with so many domains should make announcements like this every day.
Allow him to have 1K domains (like many other successful domainers) and you will never hear about him again.
Mike Mann did not pay cheap for .Co`s. I remember very well when he said that with all his .Co sales he did not make any money on .Co. You probably remember that he made many 5 figure .Co sales (he met one funny guy from Czech Republic who was constantly buying Co`s from him).
So this is reason why he did not mention the .Co price.
We have a major crisis in the industry relating to Mr. Mann now, however.
Apparently there are some who dare to call him the “The Domain King.”
We know this simply can’t be tolerated, as we all know who that title really refers to.
Here’s more that: www (dot) washingtonpost (dot) com/business/economy/domain-name-mogul-mike-mann-will-sell-you-happybirthdaycom–for-2-million/2014/11/16/eb7d88ae-69e2-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html
“People call him the Mann. The Domain King. […]”
Something has to be done about this. 😐
If you think of domain investing in the same manner as deep value investing with stocks a person can do ok if patient. We recently hand reg’d a .mobi that someone paid $10K for-a few years back.Will it be worth anything-who knows but I can hold it for 10years to find out. Same with Mr Mann’s .co. He has plenty of time.
The heading isn’t really accurate, the names clearly didn’t “cost” $750. He recently said his portfolio wasn’t making much money so lets cut the BS here.
Many people don’t like Mike, but no matter you like him or not, he is one of the most successful domainer ever.
He saw the opportunity much before many of us and invested in right domains. He is similar to Warren buffet who made fortune in investing in right stocks at right time.
For making that kind of money, you need to have lot of patience. People don’t know that he is sitting on around 300K domains and its renewal cost runs in millions each year.
Snoppy that is what the four domain names he sold cost him to buy them.
So if Frank sells a domain for $100K that cost him $1K we need to guess at home many domains names he owns estimate his renewal fees on all his domains?
Its not a story about his company, its a story about a few domain names he sold this month, how much he got for them and how much they cost him.
But that is telling only part of the narrative. If his renewal cost averages $200k/month and he got $200k of profit from sales in a month the takeaway is a lot different then just hearing he sold $75k that he paid $750 for.
It is headline grabbing, to catch your attention, may not be responsible, but he got 20 comments, and traffic, so they got what they wanted.
It is with anything in life, people always talk about the big sports bets they got right, never the dogs that burned all their winnings on.
As people in the domain industry we know if you own 1000 names, you might sell 20 per year at such expected ranges as an overall average, the cost to carry those would be close to $10K, so in order to be successful you would need to cover 10K, plus your own time, and management expenses in handling the 20 transactions.
So in the case of Domain Market, who used to spam me like crazy, via their ex vacuum salesman from Utah who no longer works there, 300K names you are looking at $2.5M per year + operational costs, so bump it up to $3M for offices, and staff, and other day to day expenses.
So that covers roughly 2% of their break even costs, that is the real story.
If he owned 1000 names this would be great, but in order to achieve this success you have to own a quantified blanket of domains that you spent millions to acquire, and work backwards to get 100x return on that.
You work on that exact same principal.
Michael,
$750 is not his costs. I think just sales should just be reported, without making a statement about profitability because that is simply not known. The current article is more like a promotional piece than news.
WOW I really love MissCandy.com great buy! even better sell. Miss Candy sounds like a game to me.
Mr Mann cherry picking names that sold and he posted on his Facebook page is like telling everyone how much you made on the home runs during the .dot com stock boom but not mentioning the ones that blew up. It’s interesting and somewhat informative but doesn’t tell nearly the whole story.
I just actually read through most of the Washington Post article I had posted the url for. Interesting reading. I thought he was the guy behind BuyDomains. Giving away $6 Million on a windfall of $25 Million is quite a substantial amount, especially when you consider there had probably also been a large tax bill on the $25 Million as well. That’s pretty cool that he did that. However, BuyDomains has always been a question mark to me because it wound up with a domain registration that appears to very possibly have been the result of possible corrupt and crooked action back in 2001. Whose possible corrupt and crooked action I cannot be certain about, however.
I had only started registering domains in late 2001 and was registering a lot one day from the library of big famous university I was not even a part of, as I did not even have my own computer yet. When I got to this one registration, which also happened to seem to be the most valuable and best one I had found that day, my attempt to complete the process was strangely and mysteriously blocked. It was the only one that was blocked that way, and I was very disappointed and saved all the evidence. This was being done through a discount reseller at the time.
After my attempt to register this one domain was blocked, you could not find this domain anywhere, like it simply didn’t exist, was not registered, and could not be registered. No one had it, and there was nothing you could do to find it or try to register it again anywhere. I’ve never seen anything like that ever since.
Then, days later it showed up with BuyDomains, only instead of the registration date being for the day my own registration efforts had been blocked, the registration date was listed as several days after that day.
Sometime later during one of the new TLD landrushes, I discovered something I had not known before, that is was possible for a registrar company to literally watch and monitor your activity of registering domains in real time, as you were doing it. I was literally told by one of them that the guy there had been watching me make my transactions that way. Then the light bulb went off and I realized that was very possibly or perhaps even almost certainly what had happened that day in the university, and would have explained the bizarre and uncanny way in which my registration attempt had been blocked. I was “allowed” to register a whole bunch of much more crappy domains (back then I was not as good at picking them), but when I finally found one that appeared to have some value – bam! No dice, friend.
I still can’t say with certainty what really happened, but I can say I’ve never seen anything like it after all these years and after countless other registrations. Did the reseller block my registration and then turn around and sell the domain to BuyDomains? How in the world was a .com held in “limbo” for days like that so that you could not even find evidence of its existence or register it anywhere else? Worse still, had the reseller company been acting on behalf of BuyDomains in some crooked arrangement whereby anything of any real value a customer happened to find might be blocked so that the giant BuyDomains could have it instead?
I simply don’t know. What I do know is that it will remain a question mark and cloud of questions relating to BuyDomains for me, and I guess by extension regarding the famous and I suppose fairly well regarded Mr. Mann for me as well unless the answer appears one day. Turns out it’s not really a super valuable domain in terms of normal selling, however. It probably couldn’t sell for more than low $xx,xxx at most, and probably would be for less I think, but it does have a certain very specific and notable value and appeal especially in terms of a sense of patriotism and with regard to the world of business. At this point I don’t even want to pursue it even if I was genuinely offered the chance, as I’d rather remain anonymous and pretty much moved on from that one a long time ago. Would be nice to have the domain, however, I do admit, and in a more just world I suspect I certainly would have had it and would now unless it had been given away or sold along the way. Definitely one I would normally be very inclined to retain and use because of its very specific appeal, however, so it is a bit of a melancholy thought and cloud of suspicion over the way things are.
Just checked. It’s still with BuyDomains, they’ve been paying for renewal all these years, and it’s not even resolving. It also remains with the registrar the original reseller had been using.
Well, on the other hand, I suppose in the unlikely event that I was genuinely offered the chance for this to be reversed or made right I would take the opportunity. It’s definitely a kind of “sentimental favorite” and patriotic domain just about any person born and active in the USA would normally want to have, especially if they were the one who found it to begin with.
I’ve also thought more about the implications of the facts regarding the registration date. You might even call it “date-gate.” Imagine you tried to register it on the first of the month:
Day 1, the 1st: registration blocked, yet can’t find domain anywhere.
Day 2, the 2nd: no one can register it anywhere, yet domain apparently still does not exist anywhere, either.
Day 3, the 3rd: Same as Day 2.
Day 4, the 4th: Lo and behold, now the domain not only exists despite all of the above and especially the inability to have registered it anywhere before this day, but the registration date is also listed as today as well.
P.S. I’m a different “John” than the one who posted at 11:17 AM.
Congrats to Mike, would be interesting how he is advertising his domains… or are these sales from regular listings such like sedo.