I missed a really nice domain name yesterday. I’ve been poking around on The Domain Name Aftermarket and ran into a really nice mortgage domain a few days ago. It was 12 years old (!), had live .edu and business.com backlinks, and a page rank of 4. That’s a premium domain name. I couldn’t find any registered trademarks, and the non-hyphenated version of the domain wasn’t live. I almost missed it, but I ran it through dnscoop, and was shocked to see how nice of a domain it was. I kept watch over it for a couple days, and started to bid as the auction neared its end.

Unlike ebay, TDNAM adds two minutes to the auction if a bid is placed within the last 2 minutes, so no sniping. It’s evil, but it probably is the way to go (especially if you’re TDNAM). Well, long story short, I got into a bidding war. I was hoping this domain was going unnoticed, but it already had some bids, so I wasn’t expecting anything. Those last ‘two minutes’ turned into an hour of bidding with almost 200 bids! I’m pretty sure that towards the end it was just me and 1 other person bidding. As the price really started to rise, I got a bit nervous, and finally had to enter my FINAL FINAL bid and walk away from the computer. I couldn’t afford to go any higher. When I came back after 2 minutes, the domain was sold to the other guy. Some guy got a really nice domain.

Bummer it wasn’t me.