I get the impression from fellow members that the majority seem to think .uk domains are a good long term investment. Hence, a lot of money is being invested. What i do not understand is if they believe this, why are so many flipping them within days of catching them. Is this just a "domainer gold rush bubble" ?
I think a lot of prime generics have development coming - it's worth setting up on the best name you can get The rest I guess are for warehousing and flipping
Prices are strong at the moment, but if you ignore shopping.uk and the unknown failed sale of gay.uk, they are achieving £6k maximum, which still falls short of what their .co.uk counterpart would likely achieve. However, it is clear that there are more 4 figure .uk sales then we possibly would have expected. I still stand by my view that prices will soften and most big ticket price sales are to investors looking to develop, rather than flip. Hope it works out for them, but nothing much has changed in terms of awareness.
One indicator may be to monitor how they sell on the .uk Sedo auction and these auctions at domainlore and ukbackorder. I think good generics will be (and some are) selling for £xxxx or £xxxxx in the short term, and I think there's a good chance their value will increase as .uk usage widens. But by that, I do mean genuinely good. The second and third tier names obviously much less so. That's where investment money may get dumped, and in the present euphoria a lot of those are worth offloading at £50 a time. In the longer term, content, content, content, and I suspect there's tangible potential not just a 'bubble'. This is, after all, the top tier domain. All just your amateur speculation by a nurse...
I'm noticing more negative sentiments out in the wild, rather than positive awareness. Sector specific news articles about brands/companies getting caught out and unhappy that someone else bought their .uk (ignoring the fact they had 5 years to act - comes down to the pro-activeness of their registrar I guess?). Its building awareness, but probably not the awareness we want?
Thats generally the case regardless though right? .uk is a "new" tld in some respects, its a shortening in others... time will tell, but the strong generics will hold well. Personally I think we'll start seeing more brandables leveraging .uk over .co.uk (for no reason other than to my eye .uk "looks better" than .co.uk ).
Watch domains like black.uk for early indicators. Names like that have obvious potential, and invite all kinds of markets. If that sells for less than £1250 then I'd say the market is showing reluctance. If it rises to £5000 and beyond, then that's more of a sign that the market is very interested. Follow the money, as they say. Whisky.uk ..... Manchester.uk What do names like that sell for? If .uk is showing potential then those sort of names should be going for £5000 to £15000 I'd have thought. If they can't make £1500 then that's a shortfall.
Okay, this is one I am definitely going to watch: https://domainlore.uk/whisky.uk I predict (guess) £2500 to £2750, but if it goes better than cheese.uk has just gone, then the market is pretty buoyant for these good generic domains. Though in the long term, as reputation grows (if it does), I think the value would be rising in next few years. People who want to sell stuff just need to get their heads round the fact that .uk can provide a selling platform just as well as .co.uk May take time but I think it may well happen. The simplicity and top tier nature of .uk just lends itself to a site with a feel of brand status. Then it's all down to content.
Well... kinda... but not really... What we generally lose sight of in these debates/discussions around value and pricing, is who is doing the buying? At this stage, are these end user sales, or are these domains changing hands between domainers and domain investors? Pretty sure these are "wholesale" transactions, and whereby usually we'd say "if a domainer buys it for x,xxx then its end-user value is in the xx,xxx region"... We don't really have the data to validate that at this stage. I'm not being down on .uk, just being realistic. As a few have pointed out on other threads, its a time of opportunity. Some names have realistically just not been available before, with large numbers of the "good and develop-able" name name inventory (across all TLDS) sitting there undeveloped by "those bloody domain squatters". Thats probably whats driving the price action, names that people are interested in developing, or just the usual domain investors / domainers. This market pool of capital is going to represent a relatively closed loop of cash... compared to end-user cash coming in and buying names for specific business reasons / drivers. Where they will generate a return aided by having the right name. 2pence.
This was inevitable in the first few weeks though. Successful domainers are *patient*. They can sit in them for years lol After all.. we're squatters.
Indeed, which is why I think we're far too early to be trying to make sense of any of the price action
My plan was to flip some buy some but prices are at least double what I expected so the second part isn't going too well
