According to a press release we just received Heritage Auctions announced today they are holding an auction in San Francisco for domain names.

HA.com is looking for:

Short, punchy one word .com names, suitable for branding a company or a new venture.

“Curb.com, Luxe.com, Hemisphere.com and Gazelle.com are great examples. .com is ideal.

Short is preferred.

Generic words, with no suffixes are best.

Curbs.com is not ideal.

Fencing.com is not ideal.

Fence.com would be perfect.

Short acronyms of 2-4 letters and .com preferred.

Examples are NL.com, ACM.com, BOHO.com and GHG.com.

We do not have buyers for letter/number combinations like H5K.com or 77F.com.

Those are not ideal.

Other two word or geo names.

In the past we have sold two word names and geographic .coms. Names like ThinkBig.com and Charlotte.com might be ideal for this auction, if priced well.

Names that match other categories at HA.com.”

Names that might be suitable for an affluent buyer in art, sports memorabilia, coins or comics may be a good fit. We cross promote these names to the big buyers in those categories. However, in the past, the overly expensive names haven’t moved ($100,000 and up). Try to keep it to $20,000 and under. Give these buyers a no-brainer decision.

We will market the auction to our 950,000 client members, investors, VC’s and through traditional media. Send over names that are perfect for investment or branding. If it has value, and you want to move it, reach out to me. We will try to give your name(s) the most exposure possible.

Since space is limited, we are looking for great names, priced well. Our sweet spot on prices is $50,000 – $300,000 for one word .com names, as you can see from past sales listed on www.HA.com/IP Everything can’t be a six-figure sale, so go ahead and send names valued under $50,000 if they are ideal for our buyers. Generic words and short .com names are what we’ve sold recently both publicly and privately.

A few domain investing (and submission) tips:

1. A common two word phrase, transposed in the wrong order, has almost zero commercial value.
CommercialLoans.com would have value. However, LoansCommercial.com has virtually zero aftermarket value.

Our buyers are not ideal for these.

2. Recently registered domain names have very little aftermarket value.

If you registered a domain name last week for $10, the chances of flipping that name for a significant return are small.

Please don’t send us new registrations.

3. Names with hyphens, unnecessary numbers or quirky spellings are nearly impossible to sell. I wouldn’t buy or submit names like buy-cars.com, house7.com or bizness.com.

These names have little aftermarket value.

4. Learn from the past. Nearly all of the historically significant domain sales have been short .com names.

Look for generic words, short acronyms or category-defining names.

.Com is king.

There have been some significant sales in the new extensions – but the supply is high and the demand (from end user businesses) is very low. The new extensions are interesting, but nearly all of the buyers are other investors.

5. Names with prefixes, like “i” or “e” aren’t in demand like they used to be.

Names with suffixes are more limiting as well, in most cases. Loan.com is a home run.

Loaning.com is more limited.

Singular versions of words like Tie.com are perfect to brand nearly anything.

Names like Ties.com are more limited, as they can only be used for ecommerce operations (in most cases). Ties.com is a category-defining name, it is still valuable, but it has a smaller base of potential buyers.

The singular version, tie.com, is a great generic brand. This is what our buyers are seeking.

We will open online proxy bidding 3 weeks before the live auction.

As usual, we try to limit the auction to 30-40 names, in total, so we have ample time to market each name effectively. Therefore, we are highly selective on which names make it to our auction.”””