You may think domaining is a niche subject and you would be right, for now, worldwide forums like NamePros have 75 thousand registered members and the main UK domain forum Acorn has almost 5000 members however it is still a very young cottage industry that progressing fast but under the radar from the average person in the street.

The selling of domain names is generally thought to consist of speculators who have bought/caught and acquired the domains eventually selling them to end users to make their profit, just as a developer would in the offline world would buy land and either selling it to someone who realises the value of it or building on it to add value and then selling.

I had often wondered whether the market has been driven by end users or whether more and more web savvy would be domainers are fuelling prices, for example the double in value of LLL.com’s has been greatly due to shortage of supply and a growing interest in them by investors rather than end users, there have been some huge sales of LLL.com’s and success stories + demand has and will continue to push their value upwards at a phenomenal rate that would attract any investor.

I decided to look at the UK domain market seeing as it is more affordable at present to get into and one of the top domain extensions, using Domain Prices who publish a list of  public UK domain sales you can get a good idea of what sells and for how much it sells for. The standout domain being Recycle.co.uk which included a website, that domain was caught after it expired a number of years ago for £5 and later sold for £150k, Fly.co.uk at £87500 is being developed but at present one of the other top drawer domains mobile.co.uk sold for £120,000 is parked, if you carry on looking through the list and checking them you would be surprised how many decent priced domains are parked, tip.co.uk £10k, eshares.co.uk £10k, Employment.co.uk £17k, thousands and thousands of pounds spent on domains bought this year that as yet have not been developed. It also includes at least one domain that I know of that was registered for £7 and sold within 1 month for over £1000.

The same trend continues if you look back to previous years sales, large sales of great domain names parked and undeveloped, it would be logical therefore to say that these names are possible future development projects or just long term investments. I checked hundreds of domains sales from this year using domain prices and 61% of the domains sold either do not resolve to a page or are parked.

Delving a little further and looking at domain sales over £5000 you would expect the amount of those developed or in production to rocket up but greater outlay can bring greater rewards and 62.5% of £5000+ domain sales are undeveloped or parked with only 37.%% actually being used or forwarded.

If you compare the domain market to investing in stocks and shares then it is only a matter of time before the success stories filter through and the mystery of buying domains as investments becomes more mainstream, a few years ago it was quite complex to buy and hold shares but today it’s a breeze, every taxi driver seems to know the stock market better than the city and has shares or a stash of Iraqi dinars

Overall domains look to be an attractive investments, extremely low maintenance costs with only the domain renewal to take care of, that aside their value can double, triple, quadruple in only a few years without developing them if you buy wisely, the secret won’t last forever though and the value of domains could balloon if more mainsteam individuals, businesses and investors decide to put their money into the market.