With all the respect to Zesty for keeping and maintaining the 3 char domains price guide, which has been a valuable resource for domainers for many years, lately it has become quite outdated and some of the price figures in it have little to do with the reality on the market. Here are some examples:
- LLL.com min price has gone quite below $4k despite the guide putting it at $4750. Recent sales on sedo: whz.com $4,050, aoq.com $3,499, xtq.COM €3,050. There are also quite a few low quality LLL.com’s available for sale on dnforum which can be easily purchased for around or below $4k.
- Low quality LLL.biz, LLL.info, LLL.us have become almost worthless, having no liquidity, except for good, premium letters, or meaningful combos.
- Min 3 Char prices (CCC.com) are also below the nominal value: LLN.com and NLL.com have a $245 and $200 min prices in the guide respectfully, however many recent sales on Sedo and GoDaddy auctions fetch considerably below that: 0xi.com $160, ui0.com $165, tq0.com $135, 0qj.com $115, aq0.com $115, 0mx.com $120, 1zg.com $165
- The biggest joke of all: N-N.com – despite their extreme rarity: only 100 are available are selling for roughly 3-4 times less than the guide’s value. There were no recent sales reported, however the latest one: 2-9.com for $617 on sedo from half a year ago is pretty close. Since recently this incredible deal was offered on DNF – with no interest at all: 4 decent N-N.com’s (with no zeros) plus an LLL.info for only $1950 – which comes down to below $500 per N-N.com compared to the $1700 minimum reseller price mentioned in 3char guide.
- L-L.com – not many sales happened lately, but a few months ago we’ve seen a few of them on Sedo auctions: q-i.com $752, z-l.com $702 – despite the noted min reseller price of $2200 for L-L.com.
Hopefully we’ll soon see 3char price guide values changed to reflect the market and being updated based on the market data to be once again a great help to domainers.
The main question on everyone’s mind is of course what will happen with the short domains in the near future, especially LLL.com’s which are the domain resellers favorites: they are easy to appraise, rather liquid and hold good value. Two and half years ago at peak times we’ve seen the min prices for LLL.com reaching $8k and after that prices started to plummet and have been falling ever since. While there are always opportunities for quick flips on auctions and forums, personally I wouldn’t advice people buying low quality LLL.com’s taking advantage of low prices as an investment – it’s hard to predict how the prices will change, they might as well keep falling and reach new lows. However the good quality LLL.com’s – with no bad letters such as: Y,Z,X,Q or even without J,W,V may represent a good investments due to the good potential for end user interest and affordable prices below $10k.
Moral of the day: Do your own research, check the recent sales and demand vs supply on the forums and marketplaces; don’t rely solely on guides!
ooooooooh… bad letters… i hate bad letters. when we move to the decimal alphabet lmno will be one letter and Q & Z will be eliminated entirely.
just saw at domaing.com pbx.co sold for 3k$. so do X matters when it come to LLL? i mean do bad characters matters when it come to LLL unless they were repeating? i think it matters only in LLLL and not lll.
Ever since the 3 letter price crash (mid 2008) the guide has never been reliable, too high for just about everything. I think it is denial/bias on the part of the site owner because the degree to which it is overstating prices has been mentioned many times in the last 2 years.
You can get a bit of feel for it with the explanation from Aug 2008 about how the downturn was a “buying opportunity rather than a correction”. Whereas when times were good it was accurate it is now about trying prop up a market in my view.
i sold 2 LLL.coms this year.. one for 5500k and the other for 16.5k
i agree the lll.com is tanking