Liquid domains market: $24.4M domain sales reported by escrow.com

GGRG Brokerage Consulting and Giuseppe Graziano published the 3rd quarter of 2017 Liquid Domains Market Overview partnering with Escrow.com and Estibot’s parent company Intelium and ShortNames.com.

This report is focused on 2017 Q3 and presents key statistics of the domains that are considered liquid in the domain name aftermarket. There are separate sections for each liquid domain name category: LL.com, LLL.com, LLLL.com / NN.com, NNN.com, NNNN.com, NNNNN.com / CC.com, CCC.com.

The report provides the percentage of domain name ownership of major regions (US, Europe, China, Rest Of the World, Private), development percentage, turnover, public sales volume, Escrow.com sales volume.

You can download the complete 18-page report here: http://ggrg.com/industry-report/

Here are some of the most interesting parts of Giuseppe Graziano’sexecutive summary:

COUNTRY OWNERSHIP AND DEVELOPMENT INDEX

With the exception of the 4Ls, the largest category of liquid domains which added 8,000 developed domains, the percentage of developed domains decreased across all categories. This might signify that while small companies who own valuable domains might still be looking to sell to investors due to attractive prices; companies looking to purchase a new domain for their web presence prefer to go for the cheaper, but still authoritative 4L domain names. Once again, 2Ls remain the most developed category (35.5%), followed by the 2Cs (28.65%) and the 3Ls (26.99%). With the exception of 2N, the other numeric domains categories (3N, 4N and 5N) hold development rates of less than 15%, which is even lower than the 4Ls (16.25%).
Starting from this edition, to ensure the accuracy of the data, we are going to consider domains under privacy as its own category, since we can not effectively tell if a domain under privacy is owned by a registrant from the same country of the privacy service.
[…] Total privacy percentage is at 21.32%. […]

SALES DATA

As anticipated, Q3 presented the lowest turnover rate in disclosed sales ever seen at 0.56%. This might be due to a few factors, including the seasonality (summer months are typically slower) and reduced investor activity. The aggregate value of disclosed transactions went down 58% from $12.9M to $5.4M. The disclosed sales volume is in contrast with the sales reported by escrow.com, which increased significantly for 3Ls, 4Ls and 5Ns, as a consequence of large end user sales or unreported portfolio transactions in these categories. According to escrow.com, the most traded category this quarter were the 3Cs category, with $8.6M, and $24.4M in sales in the aggregate. […]

FORECAST

The large volumes of undisclosed transactions, combined with fewer buyers active in the investor market, might bring back price polarization in the liquid domain categories. Price polarization is more common in markets with low turnover, where comparable sales are less effective in predicting sales prices and establishing value benchmarks. This in turn might cause decreased asset liquidity. This combination of lower liquidity, with the overwhelmingly positive returns for bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, might cause investors to shift their focus away from the domain market when looking at alternative ways to store wealth. At the same time, the exceptionally high escrow.com sales volume means that there are still great arbitrage opportunities for the investor who carefully selects the quality of domains as opposed to focusing on quantity.

You can download the complete 18-page report here: http://ggrg.com/industry-report/