During this planning stage of our auctions we are considering whether to guarantee a price for someone who commissions us to sell their domain. In another niche we wouldn’t bother with that incentive but we are wondering if there is any possibilty of having something resembling a pricing guideline for the different geo-generics.

The obvious way of going about it would be to give a generic like “HomeSales” a rating - we are imagining maybe a .15 where “Lawyers” might be a 0.9 and “RealEstate” a 1.0. Then you would take the population of a city, for example “Seattle” with 1,000,000 people. Multiply that by $1 per person to get $1,000,000 and then multiply that by the generic’s rating so that “SeattleRealEstate.com” might be worth 1 million dollars while “SeattleHomeSales.com” would then be worth $150,000.

“PuebloHomeSales.com” with a population of 100,000 in Pueblo would by the previous example be worth $15,000. Using these numbers a small city of 10,000 people would see the site “SmallvilleRealEstate.com” be worth $10,000 while “NewYorkRealEstate.com” would be valued at $7 million. None of those estimates really seem out of line when the amount of money that could be realized to the domain owner through commissions is considered. One sale could be a $50,000 commission and over 20 years an easy million dollars without even trying, we think.

These price estimates could be set from previous auction data as well so that there might be some per capita difference between certain cities, data like average income, amount of tourism, proximaty to an alternative city’s business and services area, state, etc could all be factored in so that one could get a rough idea of what the sales price should be.

Likewise there might be a difference in the applicability of specific generics to a specific city or city type that could be quantified in some way and factored into the selling price expectation guide and any sales price guarantees. We do have some data as regards geo-generic popularities and we will attempt to put together a first draft of our pricing expectations, the goal being to roughly sort the generics.

The general idea would be to guarantee a low amount that might still be deemed as being fair. Until we start bringing in a steady income we will be unable to offer this guarantee unless the geo-generics that we sell are of such a low desirability that they have a low price and then the question would become the amount of work we would have to do contacting end-users.