Recently a client came to me with an idea about starting a domain leasing / renting website, where domainers could list their domains and people could rent them for a period of time. The advantage for domainers is that they could potentially make more money while the domain is parked, plus the increased possibility that the person renting the domain would be more inclined to buy it once they see the value. It could also serve as a way to 'test' the domain before buying. For the person renting the domain, it means they can get high quality domains for a fraction of the price. There's a whole lot of legal mumbo jumbo involved and so many things to take in to consideration, but as a concept, does domain leasing fly or is it whole load of crap? Opinions...
sounds like to much legal crap to get involved with who takes charge of hosting? they would need to be a set contract term what if the site did really well, the person who owns it will just use it for himself
its a bad idea after the hard work of the person who get it for rent would have to loose all his hard work for the doaminer. Absolutly bad idea and that happened with me once .
The concept would be to become our own domain registrar, domainers transfer the domains to us so we control the DNS. Of course, then there is the possibilities of spamming using the domain, putting dodgy content on the domain etc. But this can be mitigated by using recommended hosts. When you buy something off ebay or do a project on scriptlance how do you know you are not going to get screwed over? Ratings and trust. Our approach would be similar. We have approached a couple of hosting companies, and they seem to be really interested in the idea - although some searching on Google shows it's not new by any means. Appreciate your input, glad to see we all have the same reservations Peter
Of course it makes sense, if fact, it's already in operation. Ever heard of the company LeaseThis.com?
Sure this could work, with the prices in domains rising and parking revenue going down it makes more sense. And yes lots of legal mumbo jumbo would be involved but that goes for many serious business ventures. I dont think being a registrar or host has anything to do with this though, you just need to be a middle man connecting the two parties (leaser and leasee)
it dint come in mind that rating system will work here eventhough there are many people who will come new to the website (scammers) how would a member get reputed ? just after signing up ? however there would be alot of people scammed out of which some wil get better reputation and so it will go from there . not a bad idea if you already started for this project.
After building traffic to a rented domain name, why wouldn't a webmaster buy it? Renting could be more affordable for a start up that needs to have traffic, get paid off of the traffic, to one day buy the domain name free and clear. Agreeing on price ahead of time with make 3 1 year lease options; similar to real estate would be a good thing. Once you have a system in place, all you have to do is follow the system. Its legal and well new trends need a couple of guinea pigs before people get them right.
Yeah it could work, but one idea I would follow would be to set a 'Buy It Now' price prior to the contract being finalised. Like someone else said, it would suck if you couldn't get the domain afterwards. So agree a selling price that would be optional for the buyer on completion of a year's contract. Think that's the only way it would work else the owner of the domain might inflate the price if the person's website does well. Just my 2 cents.
Renting can work even if no future buy is offered, picture this example: Domainer Joe has valuable name (say laptops.com) parked and makes $1000/mo parking revenue (and thats been decreasing lately) Renter Sam offers Joe $2000 month rent to forward laptops.com to SamsLaptops.com and Sam is now making an extra $5000 in sales...
Why after all these years there are no MANY companies with that business model ? Domain Names became very fragile the last years How you can be sure that the this person will not take your domain and spam, create some pages against the TOS of Google which will ban him and blacklist your domain too Renting maybe good only when you're the admin of the site That's my opinion about renting
It could work very well if you have quite a few premium domains in your site. People would probably like to rent them. And its a win-win for all parties.
Thanks for the input guys, I think we're going to move it to the next stage and draw up some requirements and specs. Being a software development company certainly helps with projects like this I've heard of leasethis.com, but only when I started doing some research in to the whole domain renting industry. I never even knew about it or thought about it until someone approached our company. I think it could have a marketplace if people knew about it. For example, the guy that recently sold pizza.com, he could have made at least $25k/mo if he rented it instead. He wasn't even doing anything with the site for years and years. Peter
Granted that there maybe legal issues/contracts that would need to be perfected that protects both client (for website income purposes's) and domain owner (ownership income purposes's) the concept of domain renting/leasing is a sound niche market. In answering to hosting issues the domain owner needs only to change name servers to the clients host. An example of this is say if the client holds a whypark,com type account then they could edit their page and the domain owner switches name servers to ns1.whypark - ns2wh.. etc. The contract would need to prevent domain owner from publishing a site for the domain name in question to protect the clients investment interests. There are many companies online who rent/lease domain names but they don't all appear to be that busy. One reason maybe is the fact that the domain names on offer seem to be fresh ie without PR, Alexa, Backlinks, etc. I was lookinginto this concept myself and realized that the only kind of domain names that would in courage lease investment are expired domains with such heavy metrics (backlinks, PR, Ale..) All the client needs to do is publish the required pages, have a host ready, sign the lease contract, move straight in and not worry about the backlinks, PR, Alexa etc. Also if you could offer some supported links to the client (permitted that the domain owner accepts a smaller commission, due to extra service) then this could also in courage clients to utilize your domain leasing firm rather than your opposition.
Yea I do agree with you alot of pre market survey work needs to be done to see how a perfected domain leasing contract would look like. What I potently see in this concept though is the fact I could place one of my PR4 with Alexa type domains (eg: Jesusillusion,info) into the leasing market and Know that its metrics would in courage an individual/s or company to lease it. As it stands its PPC income is some what average but its traffic is quite solid (they mainly arrive from referral sites) This kind of traffic I feel would be most prized as the leasing client does not need to concern themselves with 1st page google ranking and with such could sell advertising links on landing page to 'offset' to rent/leasing fee. For me (the domain owner I would receive maybe $10 to $20 a month depending on the stability of the domains metrics and concentration of. This sort of revenue would make PPC earnings look like pennie's (which for alot of domainers it is!)
What other companies are out there other than leasethis.com? I'm thinking about leasing rather than paying for Google ads. If a name gets regular type in traffic and I could redirect it to my site, I have a greater chance of converting and I wouldn't have to pay per click. . .