Remember the story a few weeks ago about the domain name Houses.co.uk which was purchased a few years ago for £40,000 was on sale for £2,999 on Sedo?
The owner of the domain name blames Sedo and its automated valuation tool.
Peter Thornton told SellingUp.com, that the domain name Houses.Co.Uk is for sale but it was never actually available for £2,999.
“Instead, he has blamed domain name sales website Sedo.com for putting an automated valuation on his domain which he feels was several orders of magnitude too low”.
“They had an auto appraisal that wasn’t working, and gave it a really low valuation, we must have had three dozen offers, some up to £10,000.”
The owner went on to say the price was set by an ill-informed web programme and actually it should have been around £50,000.
“Really, I would sell it for what I paid for it a couple of years ago, which was $70,000, about £50,000. I’d sell it as a pair with the houses.uk domain included as well”
Of course domain name investors know the automated valuation tools should be taken for what they are just an opinion as to value but it would be foolish to blindly follow them to make selling or buying decisions.
Nothing surprises me with sEDO small on comparable / advice big on turnover. If you “have to sell” go to sedo, if you want justification / comparable prices do your own research, sedo is a brand living on the past.
SEDOs auto appraisal rarely if ever gives a domain a valuation over 10k unless its a keyword like “pilot” or similar. Houses probably does not fall in the right category.
The main problem with the auto-appraisal tool is that they put a limit of 10k on the prices you can manually enter without ordering a real appraisal. I mean it’s ok to push their appraisal service but at 99€ per appraisal that’s just not gonna work. They should allow us to enter any price up to 25,000. It would definitely increase the average domain sales prices as well and consequently their own commission.
Is SEDO even aware of all the problems their platform has? E.g. when a bidder cancels an offer, there is no way to contact them again. I can only make a guess here but I am pretty sure they lost at low seven-figures in commissions because communication is basically impossible. They should take a look at what Flippa does, they move a great deal of domains these days.
No innovation at all, it’s what kills businesses these days. Wouldnt be surprised to see the competition take over. Flippa is already grabbing more market share every day.
The appraisal tool gives me a proposal for a lll.com domain of $3999.-. (estibot value 117000.-)
The support sais, i have to order a real appraisal. Without this, i cant put a bin price over 10k on this domain.
So this post is no surprise. The tool is just a funny toy.
sedo is bad but stupid is as stupid does. and dats the name of that tune.