I just had a bad experience trying to buy a name from a domain seller. Since they have nearly 1,000 names for sale there’s a chance you may encounter them so I wanted to share with you what happened. It’s an interesting story and if you are a domain investor, I urge you to read it all. In a nutshell, the representative would not sell me the domain for the advertised price, trying to get me for another 233%.

The web site name is DomainContractors.com, on which they list the domain names they have for sale. I’ve researched the company and I see that they are associated with Corporate-Image.com, a firm that sells toll-free phone numbers.

Here’s the story:

On Friday, December 2, I decided to track down the owner of the domain in which I was interested. It was not listed on Afternic and Sedo, so I went to the Whois record. All contacts were Anthony Kinnear of DomainContractors.com in Forrestville, California. Although the email referenced a W Hansen at Coprorate-Image.com, the e-mail with my price request went through to Anthony (Tony).

He quoted me $10,000. I told him it was too high for me and thanked him. He wrote me back that day and told me to feel free to make an offer. After I said the price was way out of my ballpark, telling him I thought it was around ¼ to 1/3 the price, he replied with “Do the absolute best you can, and I will send it to the boss on Monday and see what he says.”

I offered $3,000. On Monday, December 5, I received his rejection email. He told me that they’d already rejected an offer for $4,000 and had a Sedo appraisal that valued it at $25,000 in the next 3-5 years. He also made a point of telling me the name gets type-in traffic.

I replied with a request for type-in traffic stats and parking income. He then told me “Stats are irrelevant to our business. We sell branding, not income.” This is when I started to mistrust the guy—after all, he’s the one who brought up type-in traffic. Guess it was worth selling, but not worth proving.

I was getting tired of this game, so I sent off another message that day that contained this request: “Maybe we can stop the back and forth. I always hate the Arab Bazaar method of trading. Just simply tell me the price that you’ll sell it for–today. We’re both in the domain business, and we both know that domain names are always listed above the real “today” sales price. We know it’s not $10,000 or you would not have asked me to make an offer after I mentioned my much lower price range. So, please, what is the sales price if escrow is started today?” A simple request I thought.

His reply on the price: “If you wish to purchase the URL by itself [without what else?] we will do it for $7,500 with escrow, or $6,500 with paypal.com.” Now I was really getting suspicious. Why would I have to pay $1,000 more for the name if I purchased it through an escrow company, the norm for the industry? I later discovered that even his own web site says they use i-escrow.com (about $100 for this).

Leery of all this, I decided to do some more snooping around. I went back to the whois information and saw the name of the company and searched for it on Google to see if they had a web site. I found DomainContractors.com. I had never thought about looking for one since we had been conversing via email.

The site listed their domains for sale. I quickly found the domain I wanted and it was listed for $3,000! I double checked what the price meant. No, it was not a minimum offer amount; it was the sales price! Plus, their site even says “No reasonable offer refused.” Wasn’t meeting the asking price a reasonable offer?

I wrote the following back to him: “Tony, something’s not right here. I made my way to your web site for the first time and I see that the price for the domain name is $3,000, which coincidentally was my original offer. Shouldn’t you honor the price you are advertising? I assume the price to be correct since it is in line with all the [prices of] other domain names on your site. Had I gone to your site first, I would have simply contacted you and placed the order for $3,000. I don’t see any disclaimers that prices may not be accurate.”

His response: “The owner is on vacation until mid January. When he returns, I will talk to him about the misprint and get back to you sometime in the next few months. Thank you for providing that valuable information. Until he returns, the price I quoted you stands.”

Wait a minute, Tony! Didn’t you already tell me you were speaking with him the same day? Hmmm.

Now angry, I shot off an email to him which included: “I don’t know if you were trying to make the spread between 3,000 and 6,500 and pay the owner (if there is one) 3,000 and pocket the 3,500, or more likely (with you as the real owner) you were hoping I didn’t see the price on the website (which page I’ve captured as proof already) and tried to milk an unsuspecting buyer. Either way, it’s shady business.”

I then told him I would publish an article on this here, and contact the Better Business Bureau, both in his town and online..

He replied: “I told you once, we already rejected $4,000. Say what you like about us. Anyone who wants a domain name buys it for its value to them (using escrow service), not what someone says about the seller. They really don’t care, as long the property (url) is what they want. If you want to get honest with me about why you want the url, you might be able to get a compromise, but you will never get it for less than what someone else has already offered. Feel free to spend hours saying nasty things about his company. I just work here. The owner is on his sailboat in the Greek islands. You asked me for a price, I gave you one. I have worked for this company for 10 years. Your cheating insinuation definitely cost you a better deal.”

Don’t you always love the old “I just work here?” What a model employee a boss should be proud of. And, “If I was honest about what I wanted the name for?” Huh? Not that it’s any of his business, but it was for a blog and that’s what I told him. BUT, why the hell is it his business what I do with the name? Do some uses get a lower/higher price?

I followed up with another email that contained this: “What is the purpose of having prices on your web site? To confuse? Am I to assume that every one of your names is mispriced? I would have to assume so since if the domain was priced at $10,000, it would–from what I’ve seen so far–be the most or one of the most expensive names on your site. That should put it up on the [Premier] Premium names page since the other ones there top out at around $6,500. But it’s not there. Such a valuable name and it’s not there? Interesting isn’t it? That’s because the price of the name is really $3,000.”

His final email to me was that I am a harasser and he was not going to read any more of my emails.

I’d like readers to take a look the DomainContractors.com web site and see what you think. Does it appear the prices are the sales prices or not? Given the prices of all the other domains, Do you really think a visitor should somehow know that all the prices are misprinted and understated by 70%, which was the case with my name?” Or, if my name was the only one misprinted (and by $7,000!), shouldn’t that name have made it to the “Showcase” domains?

Can you imagine if you went to Afternic or Sedo and went to purchase a domain name and they told you, sorry, the price was over 200% higher than listed?

It’s very interesting that a $3,000 domain name went to $10,000 while the boss was in the Greek Islands, and I could save a $1,000 if I shoot the money off to (whose?) Paypal account instead of doing their usual i-escrow?? I cannot draw any firm conclusions, but given the conversations I have related here, I certainly have my suspicions.

Fair warning to all.

(They have since removed the domain name from their site.)

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