What is the best way to buy a large domain portfolio? (1.Viewing)

With all the talk about uni buying domainers portfolios, it got me to thinking what is the best way to actually buy a portfolio. I see some members have also opened topics soliciting the purchase of portfolios. So outside of the monetary issue, let's say an agreement is reached, what is actually the ideal way to buy an entire portfolio? So domainer A sells domainer B a sum of 500 domains.

In most cases that is quite a task and even if one somehow finds a way to automate pushing or entering of the transfer codes the task can still take up a considerable amount of time.

My ideal way to purchase someone's portfolio is to take over their godaddy account. Simply change the login and all information associated with the account and then mass change the whois and nameservers to mine.

That would be ideal.


Now for reality.....


Most domainers have many registrar accounts with many different logins so short of transfer codes there is really not an effective way to move hundreds of domains from one account to another.

I remember purchasing over 100 domains because I basically wanted a select few of them. I never bothered changing anything from the other domains, I had what I wanted and the rest was just waste to me so I did not care what happened to them. The idea of moving over a hundred domains didn't much appeal to me and was not a task I felt like working on.

So outside of the purchase of a portfolio, what are the logistics in moving that many domains?
As a domainer if you were to buy 500 domains from someone how would you facilitate the transfer process?

Interesting topic. I actually bought a .ca domain portfolio which started back in May of 2018. We did up a 3 year contract with the last payment of April, 2021. I normally set budgets on what I want to spend on a yearly basis. Like most of us, I normally go over. I actually paid everything off last year so I can say that buying domain portfolios does work.

A brief overview of the contract:

- Payments were paid every 6 months.

- Every 6 month payment, a batch of names were released to me. The names were already drawn out as to which names I would receive.

- Names stayed in his name but I was free to request NS changes at anytime.

- Any inquiry requests that came from Whois would be forwarded to me.

I’m open to any questions. Depends on the question. I may or may not answer.

MapleDots said:

As a domainer if you were to buy 500 domains from someone how would you facilitate the transfer process?

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When I did purchased a batch of domains, I created an account with the same Registrar and requested the Registrar to handle the transfers, since they were happy to retail the domains and the business with them, rather that preparing a list of Auth codes to send it away.

The domains were all at the same Registrar. So it worked out well for me.

If I had made up my mind to buy a big portfolio, I'd take the time to do all the transfers, and if there were any secure shortcuts to it I'd definitely use them. Or as in the original case, if I bought a portfolio for just a few of the names in it, I'd transfer those and leave the rest if they were really of no interest.

What I'd be more interested in is how do you value a portfolio of 200, 500, 1000+ names? It seems that the average value I've seen is about $200 to $250 per name with some of the big .com portfolios. In those cases I assume there is a small percent of top quality names, then some mediocre ones and then filler names.

MapleDots said:

what is the best way to actually buy a portfolio.

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Simple. Send me a bank wire with enough zeros and I'll just give you all my passwords!

Seriously though, the best thing is to collect all the auth codes from the various registrars. If there are a significant number from any one of them, just ask support for the entire list rather than retrieving them one at a time. Then hand the list off to your new registrar and they should do the rest for you. Usually someone selling a portfolio will always want to keep a handful of domains, so they typically can't just give you their password and take over the account. The portfolio I bought in January was just a simple batch push. A push is nice because you can then decide if you actually want to renew everything before paying to transfer.

how are people seeing portfolios nowadays with the WHOIS gone all private? are there places where people are shopping full portfolios, word of mouth...? Sometimes I do get emails from people with lists of domains but they are usually crap.

domains said:

how are people seeing portfolios nowadays with the WHOIS gone all private?

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Honestly its just been dumb luck where I inquire about a single domain and it goes from there.