Search Domain Sales History

Comps Are the Only Honest Pricing Signal

Ask ten sellers what their domain is worth and you get ten fantasies; ask the sales record and you get facts. Comparable sales — "comps" — work in domains exactly as in real estate: the recent, closely matching transaction is the anchor every serious negotiation returns to. When a buyer claims your asking price is absurd, three comps of similar length, extension and keyword from the past eighteen months end the argument better than any appraisal score. This is also the tool that stops you overpaying: a seller asking $25,000 for a name whose closest comps cluster at $3,000 is not negotiating, he is fishing.

Building a Comp Set That Actually Compares

The skill lies in choosing comparables that genuinely match. Work through four dimensions, in this order of importance:

  1. Extension. A .com comp prices a .com. Cross-extension comparisons mislead — the same word can differ 10–50× between .com and .net.
  2. Structure. Match one-word to one-word, two-word to two-word, and letter-count to letter-count. cloudpay.com tells you little about pay.com.
  3. Category heat. A 2021 crypto comp is stale in a post-correction market; a 2019 AI comp badly underprices today's market. Weight recent sales in the same demand cycle.
  4. Venue context. Auction results (GoDaddy Auctions, expired-domain auctions) skew toward wholesale investor prices; marketplace buy-it-now sales (Afternic, Sedo) reflect end-user retail. Know which side of the market your comp measures.

Why the Public Record Understates the Market

Industry veterans estimate that the large majority of domain sales — including most six- and seven-figure transactions — are never publicly reported, hidden behind NDAs and private brokerage. The visible record therefore skews toward mid-market auction and marketplace sales. Practical consequences: headline outliers exist that you will never see in any database, and the median reported price sits below the true retail median. Comps remain the best available evidence; just treat them as the floor of the story rather than its entirety. Cross-reference what you find here with our Domain Valuator's algorithmic range and, for significant purchases, a broker's opinion.

Sales data is provided by third-party sources. Configure a Namebio API key in Theme Settings to access live sales records.

Frequently Asked Questions

From aggregated marketplace and auction records — publicly reported results from venues like Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy Auctions and NameJet, plus voluntarily disclosed private sales. Connect a Namebio API key in theme settings for the live database.
Inside stable categories, two to three years is serviceable. Inside hype-driven categories (AI today, crypto in 2021), anything older than 12 months can be off by multiples in either direction. Always ask what demand cycle the comp was struck in.
Only if a similarly motivated buyer exists for yours. Single outlier comps usually reflect a specific end user with a specific need — a rebrand, a product launch, a lawsuit settled. Price from the cluster of comps, not the outlier, and treat outliers as evidence of the ceiling.
Depends who you are selling to. If your exit is other investors (fast, wholesale), auction comps predict your outcome. If you can wait for an end user (slow, retail), marketplace buy-now comps apply — typically 3–10× the wholesale level for the same quality of name.
Either the niche is genuinely unproven — itself a pricing signal worth respecting — or sales exist but were private. Widen the search: comp the structure (length, word count, extension) rather than the exact keyword, and look at adjacent keywords in the same industry.