.Cars .Car and .Auto to be sold in a no reserve auction

.Cars .Car and .Auto to be sold in a no reserve auction at Innovative Auctions.

Launched in 2015, .Cars .Car and .Auto, are a joint venture between XYZ Registry and UNR Corp. The 2 companies claim that the 3 New gTLD extensions have generated more than $11 million in sales. They also claim a “predictable” revenue stream of $1.7MM per year with an average operating margin of 95%, “on a modest but growing registration base, with tremendous additional profit potential.”

“After a successful 5 year partnership XYZ and UNR have decided it is time to divest our mutual interest in the .Cars .Car and .Auto namespaces. Collectively we have put a lot of hard work into this investment and we have built a solid community of automotive customers. With strong utilization has come strong growth, and we look forward to watching these namespaces evolve as more automotive businesses expand their web presence.” said Daniel Negari, CEO of XYZ.

The auction will start on July 13th and will end the next day with a certain sale, since there will be no reserve price. It will be conducted independently by Innovative Auctions, a facilitator of  some private auctions held after ICANN’s first new gTLD application round.

The package of assets being auctioned includes the top level domains .Cars .Car .Auto, all related intellectual property rights, brands, social media accounts, and registry reserved domains, such as electric.car and rental.car.

“Our journey with the team at .XYZ has been nothing short of remarkable. UNR’s Investment has now matured and I’m so proud of this trio of products, our customers and the incredible latent value of this generational naming asset. I look forward to watching the .Car, .Cars and .Auto extensions move from the creative hands that gave them birth to the strong guiding hands which will curate their greater success in the future. These are incredible naming assets. It is unlikely they will ever be seen openly available for sale again.” said Frank Schilling, CEO of UNR.

Frank Schilling sold all his domain name assets (including domain name portfolio, registrar, marketplace, brand protection agency) to GoDaddy in February. All assets except of his New gTLD extensions. He now proceeds to sell the 3 extensions that were part of a joint venture with Daniel Negari and XYZ. I except Frank Schilling to sell UNR and the rest of his New gtLD extensions (which are not that good anyway) before the end of 2020.

At the time of writing this post .car has 297 domain name registrations, .cars has 275 domains and .auto has 403 domains according to namestat.org.

Interested parties may contact cars@innovativeauctions.com for further information.