- Part 2: Expiring/Expired Names
Expiring/Expired Domain Names
I talked about how and where to find domain names. Mainly, there are two ways to go about purchasing them—find the name you want and approach the owner or browse through listings and put in your bid. There is, however, one other way to grab a good domain name—target expired names.
Pretend that domain names are concert tickets. You can decide that you want a to see a certain band, search online, a find a ticket to a concert or you can just decide that you want to go to a concert and see what tickets are available in your area and in a certain price range. Both work fine.
But if you really want to see a certain band play and know that tickets will sell out just moments after they go on sale, you have to pack up your sleep bag and convince your best friend to wait in line with your at the ticket booth so that you can be sure to nab a ticket. If there’s a domain name you really want, you might have to do the same, more or less (best friend optional).
By now, you should know that cyber-squatting is not something good to do. In other words, if you see that www.MySpace.com is ready to expire, and for some reason it does by mistake, don’t buy it with the sole intent to resell it for a million dollars to the original owner. It’s slimy, and besides, you’ll lose it the owner takes you to court. That said, keep your eyes open for god deals. Typically, domain name owners know well in advance that they must repay the annual registration fee or lose their claim to the domain name. If they want to let the name expire, that’s their call.
The process is simply. When you register a domain name, you pay to claim that name for a certain amount of time—usually one year. In that year’s time you can do whatever you want with the domain name, and before that year is over, you’ll receive notices to renew your registration. As the deadline for registration approaches, your domain name will revert to an “On Hold” state if you do not renew the registration. This can last for up to a month and a half and basically serves to alert others that you have not repaid the registration fee and your name will soon expire. Sometimes this is referred to as the “Registrar Hold” period.
When your time is up, the registrar issues a delete command to the registry in order to remove your name from the system and put the domain name back unto the pool of unclaimed names. For 30 days, you will have a last chance to reclaim the name. This is known as the Redemption Grace Period. During these 30 days, you do not technically own the domain name, but you have first dibs if you want to buy it back. If you don’t respond, the name is then deleted, which usually takes about a week. At this point, anyone can register the domain name.
So how do you know if you should ethically attempt to register a domain name? Say, for example, that www.MySpace.com’s owners, for whatever reason, really did decide to just let the name expire. This would be a fantastic grab—actually, if you could register this one domain name, you’d probably be able to quit you job and move to the Caribbean. It would stink to miss the opportunity because you were worried about a lawsuit.
In reality, this isn’t going to happen. A highly valued domain name would never purposely expire—it would be sold at auction or to a private buyer. However, sometimes this does happen with smaller businesses, and it’s hard to know when you’re stepping on someone’s toes. In this case, the best thing to do is to contact the owner and make sure that the domain name truly is set to expire. If you’re worried about alerting the owner that he or she could potentially sell the name for a profit, you can instead simply scoop up the name and stay alert for contact from the previous owner. If www.MySpace.com was accidentally left to expire, believe me, the original owners will come after you. In those cases, offer the site back for fair market value to avoid lawsuits. Basically, be honest and fair and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Some experts who have been buying and selling domain names for years now don’t even bother with anything other than expired names. Finding an expired name is fairly easy, so you can get started with this method if it sounds like your cup of tea. Watching for expired domain names takes time and talent, so start with keeping one or two in mind for your portfolio and advance from there.
Finding domain names that are set to expire is not difficult. If you know the exact domain name you’d like to purchase, simply check out www.Whois.com. Whois is a service that will provide you with registration information for any .com you may desire. Especially important is the category marked “status.” If a name’s status is “active,” then it is not set to expire anytime soon. You can check on this page when it is set to expire and come back closer to that time or you can approach the owner—maybe the site is for sale already. However, if the name is set to expire soon, you may want to keep an eye on it and check with brokers to see if it is up for auction.
But what if you don’t have a particular domain name in mind? What if you simply are interested in catching expired domain names? Good news—browsing is available for expiring names as well. However, on any given day, thousands of domain names are set to expire and begin the grace period or even be deleted altogether. The sheer number can be extremely mind-boggling. What most domain name entrepreneurs do to keep this information straight is subscribe to an expiring list service, which keeps you up to date on expiring names on a daily basis. As your domain name business grows, this is definitely a service that you should consider.
All in all, names that are set to expire soon have a place in your portfolio. Although you don’t own them yet, you need to keep track of them in order to register the best domain names for the least amount of money. Like I said before, domain name buying and selling takes not only a money investment, but a time investment as well. You can be a speculator and just buy and sell in your free time, or you can be a entrepreneur and devote your time to choosing the very best names for the very best prices and then developing them to sell for the very best profit.
