Recently my wife was contacted with an offer to purchase a domain name she has held for a while. She's been emailing back and forth with this guy, trying to haggle on a price. He just responded to the latest offer saying that if he goes any higher, he'll have to wait until he can save up more money.
Enter the Google Search
We already knew that this guy, while a local college professor, is also the CTO of a large new media advertising consulting firm. So when he came back with this "save up more money" story, I got a bit suspicious. Since when does a CTO of any large company have to save up this amount of money? We're talking "new, moderately sized HDTV" level money here, not "new BMW" money. He probably drops more on a typical business lunch with clients.
I began to think the guy is trying to take the naive young suburban artist lady for a ride.
So I do a bit of searching on the name of the domain, and I stumble upon a little surprise: a tiny open source web development community (like Sourceforge), with a tiny project, with a tiny description line. And in this tiny description line is the name of our domain, and a reference to a new social networking site being developed.
Oh ho.
Out comes the whois. Our domain is a .net; he already owns the .com and .org sites with the name -- and surprise! -- they were last updated right around the time he first approached my wife. (Why I didn't do this the instant he contacted her is beyond me.) The .us domain is owned by somebody else, but I would bet good money that guy has been approached too.
So Here's The Deal
I'm not a big haggler. I never have been. But I honestly think that this guy is trying to get away with paying us a relative pittance when he really wants this domain. So I don't really know what the next move would be. She could play "cold feet," say that she's had the domain for a long time (which is true) and that she's having second thoughts about selling it. Or she could play indignant, tell him that we've discovered that he's planning to develop a business around the website, and that in light of that his initial offer seemed awfully small -- after all, we figured he wanted the domain for his own personal use, we'd say. And if he already owns the com and org sites, it seems pretty obvious that the domain is quite important to him.
Or we could just accept the amount he's going for and leave it at that. The old "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" response -- after all, we've essentially had a windfall drop into our laps, due to a domain that has basically sat dormant for at least a good three years now. But at the same time, to use an analogy, I don't want us selling a ring thinking it's brass and later learning it's twenty-four carat gold.
In the end, the decision is hers. My brother-in-law says "it's only money." (I find this somewhat ironic as he is living in my basement right now while he pays off debts accumulated while he was unemployed.) But when you have a ten-month-old daughter, a mortgage, and two car loans, on one salary... you don't really have the luxury of saying that.