Home › Playbooks

Domain Valuation Playbook

Start with what the name would be used for

Ask who would want this address and why. If you cannot name a type of business in one sentence, the name is a bet.

Names that describe a service in a place have an obvious buyer. Invented words need a brand behind them before they mean anything.

Be honest about the size of that buyer's budget too. A name that suits a one-person trade is priced by what that trade can spend.

Then ask what a buyer would give up by saying no. That is closer to a price than any list of traits.

Write that buyer down, because everything below gets easier once you have one of them in mind.

The traits buyers actually pay for

There is no formula, but the same traits keep showing up.

Treat the list as a rough sort rather than a score. Two names can share every trait and still find very different buyers.

• Short, and easy to say out loud without spelling it.
• A common ending that people already expect.
• No hyphens, no digits, no accidental second reading.
• Clean history, with nothing you would rather not inherit.
• An obvious industry, if you want an obvious buyer.

Where owners overvalue and undervalue

Owners overvalue names they love, and attachment is not a market.

They undervalue names already in use. A name with pages and a history is a different object from a name with none — one has a record, the other has a story.

Get a second opinion from someone with no stake in the name. Their first reaction is usually closer to the market than your own.

Check comparable sales before you set a price. Then be honest about which of those comparisons are really alike.

Set a floor you will actually hold to. Owners who negotiate against themselves usually start doing it in the first conversation.

How Microsite Generator handles this

If you decide to hold a name, you can put a real site on it instead of a holding page. You describe the business in conversation and the agent writes the pages.

Sites run up to 25, 50 or 100 pages with their own structure and internal links. Every page is individually built rather than stamped from a template.

Sites publish on a free subdomain or on the name itself, so you can build one before you decide anything about selling.

Nothing goes live until the compliance gate passes it, and pages are checked against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. What you can show a buyer is a genuinely useful site, not a plan.

Updated September 2026