Beware of “Comparable domains sold” at GoDaddy appraisals

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Beware of the “Comparable domains sold” shown at GoDaddy domain name appraisals. It seems some of these domain sales are older than 2006. Maybe some are even a lot older than 2006!

When I get an inquiry for one of my domains I usually check the GoDaddy domain name appraisals. I do it not to get the price of course as the GoDaddy domain name appraisals are completely useless. I do it to check any comparable domain sales that I might have missed. Usually I look for the most recent ones as I may be getting an offer from the same buyer. (I also check namebio.com.)

So today I got an inquiry for my domain “limitedbudget.com”. (Yeah, I know… I hope my buyer does not have a limited budget!!!)

I will not even comment on the Estimated Value that my domain got. You can see it at the screenshot below.

So I checked GoDaddy domain name appraisals only to see the domain I myself entered featured in the “Comparable domains sold” section with a $2,288 sales price. It was quite surprising as I remember owning this domain for many years!

GoDaddy does not provide the year the domain name was sold in the “Comparable domains sold” section.

I checked and found that I own this domain since 2008. I then checked Namebio to see if I could find more info about this sale. I only found my own purchase from 2008 for $410 at Namejet.

I then used DomainTools.com to see the whois history. So it seems that this $2,288 sale was by BuyDomains and the buyer didn’t renew the domain and it was auctioned in 2008 when I bought it. (The domain still had the signature CUSTOMER.BUYDOMAINS.COM and CUSTOMER2.BUYDOMAINS.COM nameservers in 2007.)

The 2007 whois record I found said that the domain was last updated in 2006-11-11.

So the sale shown at Godaddy was completed in 2006 at the latest!

The domain was registered in 2003 so the sale could have happened even earlier than 2006.

How is this 2006 sale helpful as a comparable domain name sale? It is not. We are centuries away from 2006 domaining. I wish I could find domains with 2006 prices!

These sales are completely useless and totally misleading as GoDaddy displays them without a date next to them.

These “Comparable domains sold” are completely irrelevant in 2020 and certainly not suitable to be used in a domain name appraisal algorithm. I sincerely hope that these comparable sales from ancient history are NOT used in the appraisal algorithm. But judging from the appraisals and how bad they are I assume they use these sales.

GoDaddy’s “algorithm” is an insult to all algorithms and it is harmful to the domaining industry. It is also undermining GoDaddy trying to maximize the value of its own domain name portfolio.

GoDaddy’s appraisal tool is deceitful for both sellers and buyers and this could be a liability for GoDaddy despite their disclaimer as they are withholding important information.

Finally, you can either have an estimation OR a true value: “GoDaddy estimates the true value of each domain by looking at millions of historical domain name sales.

(I have written again about GoDaddy appraisals. Read more here.)

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