Buying a domain somebody else holds

A name that is already registered can only be acquired from whoever holds it. There is no authority that reassigns names on request, no queue, and no arbitration on the merits of who would use it better. That reduces the problem to an ordinary negotiation followed by a technical handover, and the technical handover is the easy half.

Two situations arise. Either the name has been offered for sale, in which case the holder's willingness is established and the discussion begins with price, or it has not, in which case the first task is an enquiry, with all the care that involves. The craft of that first message is covered in approaching an owner.

Where names are offered

Names for sale surface in a few predictable places. Some sit behind a landing page at the address itself, generated automatically when the holder points the name at a marketplace, which is why an apparently idle name often turns out to carry a quiet for sale notice. Others are listed in marketplace catalogues that can be searched by keyword or extension, such as the one operated by Tappaya, a domain marketplace run by Tappaya Ventures B.V. in the Netherlands, where listing and selling by direct negotiation is free and no standard commission applies to those sales. Others again are held by dealers who never publish a list and respond only to approaches.

A group hunting for a name should search more than one catalogue, since listings are not shared between platforms, and should treat any price shown as an asking price rather than a settled one.

Agreeing what is being bought

The thing being sold is the registration, and nothing else travels with it automatically. Website content, logos, social media accounts and mailing lists are separate assets that have to be named explicitly if they are part of the deal. So does the question of what happens to mail sent to the old addresses, which matters when the previous holder ran a business from the name and its correspondence will keep arriving for years.

A short written agreement, even an exchange of messages that states the name, the price, what is included, who pays any transfer costs and the deadline for completion, prevents most of the disputes that arise later. Where the seller is a company, it is worth confirming that the person negotiating is authorised to sell, and where the seller is an individual, that the account holder and the negotiator are the same person.

Payment that neither side has to trust

The structural problem in every domain sale is that one side has to go first. Sellers are reluctant to release a name before payment, buyers are reluctant to pay before receiving it, and neither has any means of compelling the other. Escrow solves it: the buyer pays a neutral third party, the seller transfers the name, the buyer confirms receipt, and the funds are released. The escrow cost is usually shared, and marketplaces frequently provide the service as part of the transaction.

Escrow matters most where the parties are strangers, in different countries, and dealing with a name of real value to the buyer. Bank transfers made on the strength of a friendly exchange of messages are the origin of most stories about domain purchases that went wrong.

The handover itself

The mechanics depend on where the name sits. If both parties use the same registrar, the name can usually be pushed from one account to the other in minutes, which is the cleanest route. If not, the seller unlocks the name at the current registrar, obtains an authorisation code and passes it to the buyer, who begins a transfer at the receiving registrar and approves it from the contact address on the record. The buyer should then check that the registrant details show the buying organisation rather than merely the buying account, since those are different fields. The whole sequence, including the waiting periods that follow a change of registrant or registrar and during which further moves are blocked, is described in transferring to another person.

Names recently transferred are locked for a period, so a buyer planning to move the name onwards or to a preferred registrar should expect to wait rather than assume a fault.

Payment protected by escrow and a transfer completed by authorisation code are the two halves of a safe purchase. Skipping either is where buyers lose money.

Higher value names and brokers

Where a name is expensive, contested or held by a party who will not engage directly, a broker or a mediation service may be worth the cost. Such services approach the holder, keep the buyer's identity back until it is useful to disclose it, and manage the negotiation and the escrow. They generally work on a success fee basis, so nothing is owed if the name is not acquired. For a modest name held by an unengaged owner they add little; for a name whose loss would cost the buying organisation a rebrand, they often pay for themselves.

Once the name is held, the work is not finished. Nameservers have to be set, mail has to be configured before anything is announced, redirects from the old address have to be planned, and the renewal date has to be recorded where the next committee will find it.