Domain Name Rental requests are beginning

Our first email request about renting some Viper Names
What and experience this our first of many to come rental request for a couple of our domain names has caused and the experience we encountered is why we were inspired to write this article about the understanding that time is money and what is the value of a domain name.

Yesterday Logic who works and is a resident in the California Desert received an email from a professional marketing company in San Jaun Capistrano, California out by the Pacific Ocean about renting a few of our domain names because they found the names in our portfolio here Domain Name Portfolio where it states that our domain names in our portfolio are not for sale.

Recent article on Domain Name Leasing
To read our article about leasing domain names please see the link at the end our this article.

Domain name inquiries to Viper Logic actually happen more often then we would have ever thought since we only have around 3000 .com names and although this was the first time we received a rental or lease request usually the emails are requesting that we sell a domain name. We would guess that we have enough names and that they are really pretty good keyword domain names and this is why we are found and receive questions every week. We believe that what else makes the portfolio easier to locate on the Internet is in part because they have their own web site categorized and indexed instead of just being found through the WHOIS domain name owner look up here Domain Name owners look-up.

To really be honest we claim our domain names are not for sell but like anything in life everything ultimately has its price so yesterdays experience is in part to why we have put the statement on the web site about not selling our domain names however we did not have a statement about leasing our names out to a third party.

Leasing our names out to any company has been an open agreement because so long as they are being used for a real site and they are not being used for SPAMMING then the leasee wouldn’t hurt the actual quality of the domain name they are leasing and we would ultimately still own the names while making some revenue.

Yesterday’s rental request email reminds us of domain name buyer requests
We really feel it is important to share what had happen to us and more then likely to a lot of other domain name owners in that this person wanted to rent two domain names for in this case only 3 months for some kind of promotion. The two names they wanted to rent were RanchoMirageShopping.com and DesertShopping.com and we replied right away with a yes we are interested and the next morning we sent another email back explaining we would have a price to lease these two names by the end of the day.

Following a meeting early that morning we received and email from the professional marketing company that said since domain name purchases and renewals only cost and average of 9.95 dollars annually each and since they only needed them for 3 months each would we rent them out for around 4.50 dollars total.

Our reply to this was are you completely out of your mind, sending and email to a company to pay a fee of 4.50 dollars is completely a waste of their time but even more a big waste of Viper Logic’s time and just for that reason we have the opening statement on our Viper Names web site about not selling our names. We were actually going to only charge 500.00 dollars per name for a whole year since they only needed the names for a 3 month promotional campaign.

We would normally request around 1000.00 dollars and higher a year to lease each name that we are not planning to use. We offer to lease names for 1, 2 and 5 years so a leasee can be assured their name is theirs use for as long as they would like to lease it for at a fixed price so they can trust Viper Logic about not getting shut off or gauged at future date when their site is really doing well.

Domain Names that have power sell well
Education in the domain name industry really needs to be refined beyond the small goup of us that own a stable of domain names so that there can be some kind of organization into understanding the value of a domain name.

If like in our case we own and the marketing company wanted to rent a name like DesertShopping.com they are not wrong in their thoughts about the price because the price she wanted to pay is what she understands to be the value and this happens to us all of the time where a person sees we own a domain name that we are not currently utilizing so they believe they can buy it for the registration fee or even for a slight surcharge. These rationalizations by the domain name buyer or leasee are both false and this is where there needs to be and education about domain name valuation on a large scale.

There are two real underlying issues that need to be addressed with one being on the topic of Domain Name values and the other (and we address this a lot on this blog) is Time is Money.
Domain Names have a value if someone owns it then they believe it has a future value, or that they need the name for a future Internet project they are going to be building.
We look at these names as you would look at the stock market where one person buys a stock believing it is going to go up and gain in value and there is the one selling the stock that believes the value has been reached.

Understanding some factors that create domain name valuation
You can see that our name DesertShopping.com has four values right off the top:
The first is it is a .com the highest level domain name you can have and this is also known as a (TLD) Top Level Domain.
The second is the name is a two word domain name “Desert” for the site location and “Shopping” for what the site is in the business to offer.
The third is the two words make sense when put together “Desert” and “Shopping”.
The forth is the words “Desert” and “Shopping” are easy to pronounce and this leads to the ease of saying it so others understand it without needing to spell it.

Time is Money
We really do have a hard time with people not understanding the cost of time and as we mentioned above write about this topic a lot but we are going to go ahead and share it again using the lady from the marketing company as a good example.

The marketing company wanted to rent a domain name for 4.50 dollars and the cost to even reply to her email cost more then that. perhaps in her case you might say she was trying to steal the 3 month rental for nothing from us but she did not get the deal however what she showed us is that she is worth about 4.50 dollars and hour because she had to of spent at least one hour on the research of the domain names and the emails to contact us.

We like to say when you go out and apply for a job you are made an offer of say 25.00 dollars per hour then your time is worth 25.00 dollars per hour and it is really just that simple. If we spend time doing something like this marketing company did in there request for a couple of domain names then they are truly only worth 4.50 dollars and hour.

Previous Logic Talk Leasing Domain Article
We had written about the newer business model of leasing domain names on June 01, 2008 and if missed it here it is again Domain Name Leasing and in short the article was based on the toll free phone number leasing as a business and how times since then have changed and the new easy access business is the Internet and the addresses to arrive at these businesses are Domain Names or URL’s (Uniform Resource Locator) and what both the one leasing out the name as well and the leasee should know about this practice like the good and the bad.