Thoughts

Andrew Miller

April 13, 2025

Purchasing Domains on Installment Plans

I have been thinking a lot about the concept of financing the sale of domain names. Ever since I sold my first 7 figure domain in 1998, payment plans have been present. The structures have evolved, from the formation of Domain Capital in 2005 (to help me buy Software*com), bringing loans and lease financing to domains, to the launch of Escrow Domain Holdings to support installment structured transactions. In the past few months, we at Hilco Digital Assets have closed many pay over time deals, including $11 million, $5 million, $3.5m, and $7.5 million dollar transactions. The payments have ranged from 6 months to 3 years. More and more sellers are open to financing, and the major marketplaces like Atom.com support them. Other asset classes such as homes, commercial buildings, and cars offer traditional financing options. With so many domain names being acquired by fast growing, venture backed companies, the ability for them to acquire their exact match domain, the most strategic and important investment they can make, while leveraging both their cash and domain assets as the business matures, is invaluable. For the domain owner, financing can be somewhat of a misnomer of a term because there really is not a cost of capital or present value of the money as all cash today until the domain has achieved an all cash offer.  If there is no cash offer in hand, and one were not to happen for 2 years, then there was no real cost to the financing and it becomes a win-win for both sides. I expect more of these deals to continue to be negotiated, especially in the turbulent financial times unfolding. At Hilco, we are overseeing many of the most valuable exact match and category defining domain names on the Internet, and are open to financing discussions. You can see them at https://lnkd.in/e6V-QDgh

Spreading the Gospel

I am so excited about the domain asset class as a whole. There are going to be some marquee moments in the very near future that elevate the most premium domains to the next level, and help create a loud, clear message how important the most valuable one word domain names assets are in achieving trust, credibility, memorability, email security, and category leadership. I have said this repeatedly when leaders like OpenAi acquired Chat*com, and Rocket Companies Rocket*com (our deals), but beyond these high profile ones, every week there is another fast growing leader who has acquired its exact match or category domain name. We keep a running list on our website at the same link as above.

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