Hi, CASailingLady and Rolf, No, not doing market research for my business. I don’t sell domains, never have sold even one, and am actually a pretty vocal critic of inauthentic marketing. If I were doing marketing here, I would have posted the domain name, a link to buy it, and some kind of promo to drive interest. I didn’t do any of those things. My consulting business is to help social change agents make the world a better place. I work for individual social change educators and small nonprofits who are doing good in the world. I do that work out of love for the world, often pro bono, and always for well below what I could earn working for corporations, not to chase profits. I do build websites for them, but I’m not in the domain business, and no information I could gather in this thread has any value to my business. I was fully transparent that I have this domain that I intended to use for my Airbnb hosting, then got out of hosting, then much to my surprise, started receiving inquiries from brokers about it. I was interested to know what other hosts’ experience was with this, if any, and get some kind of sense for how to proceed. Thanks to those who offered constructive input.
The shorter your domain is the more valuable it is. If it’s under 10 characters is very valuable.
I think it is a broker, not a flipper. A broker is someone who owns domains and sells them to businesses or people who want to buy them.
A flipper - just like in the analogy with the houses - means he’d build a website for you, which is NOT true and I never heard of this term in IT anyway. Someone who just buys domains will never buy a website to sell you. He might offer you services to build it after you buy it, but not before.
So, it’s up to you. Will you ever use it or just pay for it year after year. As I said, they might sell it for $$$$, depending how long the name is.
If you ever tried to buy a domain - for a business - in the past years, and had ideas for a name for your business, let’s say “Bob’s pizza”, and thought, wow, a good name for the website would be bobspizza.com, only to disciver that that name is not available but you could purchase it for 10000$. This means that the domain bobspizza.com was purchased by a domain broker - probably years ago - for cheap, and they want to sell it to anyone for 10k. On top of this whoever buys the domain will have to build the website. This is just an example to make you understand how things work in real life and to help you decide whether to sell it or not.
I am a software engineer and develop websites and web apps for a living.
Edit to say that after writing this response I clicked on Bobspizza domain and it costs almost 150k to buy it from such broker. Think twice before selling it.