I happened to see CompanyBook.com on auction at Sedo today with one bid for $15,000 EUR which at today’s conversion rates comes to $20,999 USD and the reason the domain name stuck out at me. Company Book doesn’t really mean that much to me by itself.. I am aware of the term Company Handbook but not very familiar with just the keywords "Company Book" together.

Since the auction jumped out at me, one thing I like to do is check whois records. The story got all that much more interesting to me when I saw the creation date of October 11, 2009 which is only about 3 months ago.

This made me dig a little bit further and I couldn’t dig up all the info that I was looking for, so some things from here on will be assumptions and I will be clear when they are.

Although the domain name had a creation date of 10/11/2009, it was registered at least back to 2001 and maybe earlier before. It appears around July 2005 the domain name went PendingDelete again and dropped. The next whois record shows BuyDomains.com (NameMedia) mid June 2007. There is only the one whois history record showing BuyDomains as the owner and that is June 26, 2007. They could of hand registered it in July of 2005 or purchased it at auction but there is no records up to 2007.

Move ahead to November 6, 2007 and BuyDomains.com sells the domain name CompanyBook.com for $2,288 USD as reported on DnJournal.com.

According to whois records, a Daniel Ollmann is listed as the owner of the domain name then, that is until the domain reached expired stated July 23, 2009 after owning it for about 2 years. The domain name followed the expiration period of approx 76 days and was released from the registry October 11, 2009. The domain name was captured on the drop and went to a 3 day auction at SnapNames.com as the registrar Answerable a partner registrar of Snapnames captured the domain name. The reason I know there was a 3 day auction, is because the creation date is the 11th and a whois records change October 13th with the new owner. The auction starts the day of the creation date if there are more than 1 backorder.

Assumption ~ 9 times out of 10 a domain name is reported sold to DnJournal.com if the sale price is over $2,000 USD (for .com) and the buyer didn’t request it not to be published. Domainers rarely care if a sale price is reported on a PendingDelete auction they purchase. So my assumption is the domain name was purchased at auction on SnapNames on October 11, 2009 for at least under $2,000. It really could be between $59-$1,999.

Linecom has owned the domain name since October 13, 2009 and today I discovered the $20,999 bid placed on the domain in a public auction.

Since a domain name is not considered "Sold" until after paid for and a change in whois records, well will have to wait a little while yet to see how this turns out but I think two things will happen.

1.) nobody else will bid in the auction and the seller would of likely been better off just accepting the $20,099 offer instead of sending it to auction.

2.) the likely buyer will be Daniel Ollmann as he was the last owner and also appears to own the other major TLD’s for CompanyBook.

CompanyBook.com Sedo Domain Auction

I will keep an eye on the domain and we should be able to tell a little bit more after the auction ends and if or when the domain transfers. My guess is Daniel didn’t intend for the domain name to expire and he wants it back. Since he did not pay the renewal fees required to keep the domain, it expired and was purchased by a new entity. Since Daniel likely wants it back, it likely will cost a price to get it back that he and the buyer are happy with. This time, that price may be $20,099 USD.

Ways to prevent an unwanted domain deletion:

  • Use Auto-Renew if the domain registrar offers it
  • Be sure to keep your Credit Card info up to date
  • Keep your email address up to date
  • Make sure any notifications from your registrar is marked "safe" so it doesn’t go to the spam folder
  • DomainTools.com offers what is called Registrant Alert, which you will be notified upon a status change to a domain using the service
  • Try to keep all your domain names at one domain registrar
  • Renew before the domain reaches expired status

P.S. please do not think that you can just purchase any domain and have this happen. As they say in the weight loss commercials… Results Not Typical!