Leapfish valuations?

[replic8te]

Howdy,

Newbie question for ya. Ive seen a few sellers referencing Leapfish domain evaluations around the net.

Is this considered an accurate evaluation? Is there something better to use as a best practice that can create confidence in my buyers if I want to use evaluations?

TIA
Mike

[thevirtual]

Is this considered an accurate evaluation?

NO

[replic8te]

Good nuff, so what to use instead?

[dodo1]

Good nuff, so what to use instead?

Moniker.com
sedo.com

DNForum.com Appraisal Section

[katherine]

Is this considered an accurate evaluation?

Sometimes. But it's more hit and miss and I would clearly never trust that kind of tool to price my estate

Is there something better to use as a best practice that can create confidence in my buyers if I want to use evaluations?

If you want to instil confidence then you need to forget about automated appraisals completely, or the buyers are all gonna laugh at you ! At least those who ain't dumb. If they are smart automated tools will destroy your credibility.

Imagine I am brokering a top generic .com domain like cars.com and approaching Fortune 500 companies who may be potential buyers for the domain.
How do you think they would react if I told them the domain is priced at $80,000,000 just because leapfish said so ?

Appraisal is not an exact science. If you approach buyers or get inquiries you need to be able to justify your asking price. The questions you should ask yourself include:
- how generic is the name ? (number of keywords, length etc)
- how strong is the TLD ?
- branding potential ?
- which industry the keywords relate to ?
- existing traffic and revenue ?
- any comparable sales reported ?
- name taken under other TLDs ?
- etc

With experience you try to sort the wheat from the shaft. With or without reasearch it's usually not hard to tell if a domain is good or not.

[BTW leapfish thinks the 'fair value' for cars.com is $84,974,330.00.
So far there are not reported sales in that range so it's safe to say this estimate is probably above current market rates but you get the point].

[RustyK]

it's more valued for archives than anything else. I have a few 6-7 figures domains using leapfish and its because of the website archives.

[INVIGOR]

You Can Try Estibot.com. It's Ok. There Is No Perfect One.

[replic8te]

ty all

[BidNo]

Automated appraisals are inherently flawed.

If you're trying to build buyer confidence on fair market value, the most accepted approach is comparable sales. See the site in my sig for help in finding these; it's the largest and most accurate repository of domain sales history anywhere.

[arpitgosai]

leapfish is nothing but a big joke.

[stockshark]

I own a very popular generic one word .us domain which was valued by leapfish at $19,000
A few weeks later it valued the same domain at $105,000
The very next day it valued it at $8,000

Leapfish is not consistent and I would not depend on it for anything other than entertainment value...

[stewmath]

are .us and .de domains good to go for as well as .com's??

[tristanperry]

.de isn't as valuable as .com or .us, although it's still a pretty good ccTLD

[-Raja-]

.us is way behind .de,
ccTLD Registered Country
.de 10.281.462 Germany

.de is the most popular only after .com

[dodo1]

.de isn't as valuable as .com or .us, although it's still a pretty good ccTLD

.DE domains are both more popular and more valuable than .US domains. I'd say you should invest mostly in .COM and the ccTLD of the country you're living in.

[mvl]

Leapfish is funny

[stewmath]

i think i prefer estibot

[edyst3]

Just post your name on dnforum appraisal thread.
IMO, human appraisal is more accurate than free software...

[impactadmin]

I also agree. Automated appraisals or evaluations are never truely accurate and most times way off.

Best off using human valuations against your domain along with various tools to do soem research for you including overture, alexa, archive.org, appraisals, Google link checks and so forth.

[Stian]

Hi Mikel!

Leapfish is good for one thing and one thing only - to find out if the domain has a registration history. If you get a high leapfish score, the site has most likely been registered and/or developed for a longer period of time and it might still have some traffic/backlinks. The reason for this is that Leapfish' appraisal value is mostly based on the archive.org score. Try out some LLL.com/.net's etc. and you will find many that Leapfish appraise in the lo $xxx-range if the domain doesn't have a history of development. In other words, pretty worthless appraisal system... And don't ever mention your domain's leapfish appraisal in your sales pitch, it may attract the beginners, but in the long run it'll just draw potential buyers away.

That's my opinion though ..

Instead of using automated appraisal sites, do some research of your own (as you guys mentioned up here) .

Value of your domain can be based on, among others:

- Google results
- Page rank (if any)
- OVT (if any)
- OVT w. ext (if any)
- Acronyms
- High quality/profitable acronyms (e.g. 'United Bank Association' is better than 'Underground Blood Assassins' )
- Premium/common letters
- Pronounceable name
- Phone score (is the name easy to spell over the phone/speech?)
- Is the name wikipedia listed? (e.g. dictionary names, well-known abbreviations etc.)
- archive.org score (has it been previously developed)
- Domain age
- Previous comparable sales
- Letter patterns (for a 4-lettered .COM the pattern often counts as if the name is pronounceable or not)

.. I hope this helped a little .. Good luck!