barney

I was lucky enough to grab www.gastonia.com, which is the name for my
hometown city (Gastonia, NC) Gastonia has about 80,000 inhabitants, and
the county has over 200,000 - I'm 12 miles west of charlotte, nc
(largest city, 500,000+ population).
Given the growth of the area (appx 7 to 10% per year), what would be a
fair market value for a domain such as this?

blue

barney

Blue,
I usually change the order of the words in the expression "fair market
value" to "fair value [for the] market".

The "fair value" is all relative to the market where you are able to
find a willing buyer.

Some of those "markets" might be "city guides", a radio/TV station (or
other news media) would be another; a chamber of commerce is yet
another; a major real estate company could be yet another. The fair
*value* for each of those markets would, likely, be different.

The City-Guide1 Network has been in Gastonia for quite some time -
albeit with a poor content presence. But then, they are dealing with
tens of thousands of domain names, so they put their resources where
they get the most return on them.

I've marketed dozens and dozens of "city/place" names, and in doing so
I developed an Excel spreadsheet formula that accesses the census
population data, and arrives at a weighted value -- within the market
of "city guides" ... which is to say, this value is targeted to a
company that is interested in developing a city guide for a particular
city/town in the US.

For *that* market, Gastonia, NC comes out to be $17,000. It's
important to note that this is based on a projected 2004 population,
derived by the Census Bureau, of 68,292. The 2000 Decennial Census
population for Gastonia was 66,277. These source figures differ
significantly from your posted population number of 80,000 (a
difference of 15%).

Another online service, places an averaged value assessment of about
$12,000 on the domain name -- however their source data is rough.

While those figures may sound good, I don't think that *market* exists
(anymore) for Gastonia.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The *real* *question* then, is who can you market the name to? -- and
at what price.

Bottom line, my guess is *if* you actively marketed it, you might find
a buyer in the $2000 range. I think your market is fairly limited to
what you can find in Gastonia, NC.

Of course if you decided to develop the site yourself you might earn
that, or more, per year

Just my cent-cent worth.

barney

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate the time you took to answer it
thoroughly enough to actually give me some insight to the domain's value.
I'm just now finding out there is this whole world of 'domaining' and
'domain parking.' Gastonia.com is currently parked with Sedo.com. It
generates about 7 dollars per day in revenue from click throughs. While
I am clueless still to 'domain real estate values' my finance background
tells me to keep it parked as the return on investment in the long run
is more valuable than a one time sell (at least for me it is).

Are you into domaining / parking? Or do you buy to sell? I can see how
addictive this trend could be. A domain name from a registrar as low as
7 bucks a year from some with the potential to sell it at not only
double, but possible hundreds of times more than it's purchase price.

I like to know more about the excel program you've created if your
willing to share, or some rules of thumb / tricks of the trade for
valuing domain names.

I also see a lot of crazy domains listed here for sale. things like
'googlespreadsheet.com' or, especially in the adult realm
'xxx-teen-anal.com' and stuff like that. Do these crazy domains
actually sell? I could register those all day long, hehe

I'm going to start a new thread on parking and would appreciate your
insight if you're familiar with this territory.

Darioush

worth some money for a local inhabitant , or quite a lot of money for an end user like a business or a government agency.

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