A domain investor lists his three-word .com for $250,000 because an automated appraisal tool told him it was worth that much, or because a broker mentioned the figure once at a conference and it calcified into fact. That number has nothing to do with what anyone will actually pay for it, and everyone involved secretly knows this.
The number that matters
The real price lives in three questions nobody puts in a listing: how badly does the buyer need this exact string, what did the last three comparable domains actually close for, not list for, and is there a second buyer in the room creating urgency. Strip those out and you’re left with a number someone made up.
Brokering is mostly the work of translating a seller’s emotional attachment into a figure a buyer’s finance team will actually approve, and translating a buyer’s budget ceiling into an offer the seller won’t find insulting. Both sides are usually wrong about the market by three to five times, in opposite directions.
Why the tools keep lying to you
Automated appraisal engines extrapolate from thin, stale sales data and round up, because a tool that tells sellers their domain is worth less than they hoped doesn’t get used twice. The incentive is to keep you logged in and listing, not to be right.
Real price discovery happens quietly: outreach to the three or four companies who’d actually use the name, a soft deadline, and a broker willing to say “that number is fiction” to a client who doesn’t want to hear it. None of that shows up on a valuation widget.
If a broker quotes you a price before asking who the buyer is and how urgently they need the name, they’re guessing same as the algorithm. Ask what actually sold, to whom, and why. Everything else is a number somebody wanted to be true.
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