I have a terrible feeling that I missed out on something important here. I looked into the effects of domain name age on SERPs and concluded that its actually the amount of unbroken time that the domain has been indexed that matters more. Should I have put up a one page site and linked to it from other sites to get it indexed? Would it have been better now that I come to develop a site on it? I think I see the sandbox on the horizon
Yes, from my experience it's not the reg date but the amount of time indexed. You should put up a single page and get it indexed asap.
Having site index does help but it takes more time than a few months to make real difference. Domain also should be registered for more than a few years to get best possible benefit.
if it's not indexed by search engines, i think you will not make any seo profit from that domain. search engine will care first cache date