Domain buyers contacting registrants of domains for sale have been placing “lowball” offers for years.
A common approach is to claim that one is a poor student, working on some kind of “thesis” with a limited budget that can only fund so much of a domain’s asking price.
Of course, all this is an attempt by more or less seasoned domain investors to acquire a domain name from an end-user or other domain investor, using a sneaky technique.
Another, similar approach that we came across is that of the “sentimental value” statement.
What exactly is an offer extraction made on a domain name’s sentimental value?
The other party does not necessarily make an offer for the domain but shares a short, sappy story about the domain’s past. Perhaps, it was registered by them before, or their relative who passed. The idea is to attempt to extract a low asking price from the domain’s owner, as opposed to making an offer in the first place.
This is yet another sneaky technique that can lead to two possible outcomes: The domain’s seller gets suckered by the sob story by the other party and provides, more or less, a discounted price, or they don’t bite the bait and they quote the regular asking price.
Alternatively, one can just ignore such communications of “sentimental value” as they are indicators of a very low budget. These attempts to get the domain can be a waste of time, once it’s clear that the true “sentimental value” is basically the cost of registering the domain, which the other party claims they “forgot” to renew in the distant past.
Moral of the story: When you see the words “sentimental value” you can send the other party to the matching .com domain, SentimentalValue.com. It’s part of the NameFind LLC portfolio and arrives with a not-so-sentimental value of just under $5,000 dollars. 😀
