Best Way to Buy a Domain Someone Else Owns

Short answer: the best way to buy a domain someone else owns depends on one thing, whether the owner has already put a price on it. If the name is listed on a marketplace, buy it there and you are done in minutes. If it is unlisted, send a direct offer through the registrar's forwarding address. Hire a broker only when the name is genuinely valuable and the owner will not engage with you.

That sounds obvious written down. In practice most buyers do it backwards. They find the name registered, decide it is hopeless, spend three weeks trying to identify a human being behind a privacy shield, and never check whether the owner listed the name publicly two years ago with a buy now button on it.

The three routes, and what each one actually costs

Here is the same acquisition run three ways. Assume a two word .com you would pay up to $3,000 for. The point of the table is not the exact figures, which move, but the shape: the cheapest route is also usually the fastest one.

On a $3,000 name, a broker at 15 percent turns your budget into $3,450, or forces you to open $450 lower to stay whole. That is worth paying when the broker gets you a name you could not otherwise reach. It is pure waste on a name that was sitting on a marketplace the whole time.

Which route fits your situation

• The name is listed with a price. Buy it. There is nothing to negotiate and nothing to gain by trying, and listed names do get bought by other people while you think about it.
• The name is parked on a for sale page. The owner is a seller who has not named a number. Use the form on the parking page, because it routes straight to someone who wants the transaction.
• The name resolves to a real, working business. Reset your expectations. You are asking a company to rebrand. This almost never works at any price you would rationally pay.
• The name is registered but sits on default or blank nameservers. This is the interesting case, and the one worth a direct offer. Somebody bought it and did nothing with it.
• The name is unlisted, valuable, and the owner has ignored two approaches. Now a broker earns their commission, because reaching unresponsive owners is the actual service you are buying.

Finding the owner now that WHOIS is retired

Most guides still tell you to run a WHOIS lookup and email the registrant. That advice is out of date twice over. Registrars have redacted personal registrant details as routine practice since GDPR took effect in 2018, and on 28 January 2025 ICANN completed its move to the Registration Data Access Protocol and sunset WHOIS as the official source for gTLD registration data. Running a WHOIS service is voluntary for registrars now, so results vary by whose copy you hit.

Use RDAP instead, and calibrate what you expect from it. On a typical .com held privately you will get the registrar, the creation and expiry dates, the nameservers and an anonymized forwarding email or a web form. You will almost never get a name or a phone number. That is fine, because the forwarding address is monitored and relayed, and it is the correct channel.

Two fields there are worth more than the contact details. The nameservers tell you whether the name is parked for resale, which tells you the owner is already a seller. The expiry date tells you how the owner thinks: a name renewed ten years out belongs to someone who intends to keep it, while a name expiring in six weeks belongs to someone who may be reconsidering. The deeper mechanics of all of this, including what to do when the lookup gives you nothing usable, are in our guide to buying a domain name that is taken.

What to put in the offer email

Assume your message arrives in an inbox that receives a lot of automated junk, and that the recipient will decide whether to read it in about two seconds. Short and specific beats warm and vague every time.

Four things belong in it, and almost nothing else. Say which domain you mean. Say you want to buy it. Name a specific figure. Say you will use escrow. Something close to this works:

Hi, I would like to buy examplename.com. I can pay $1,800 today through Escrow.com, with the escrow fee on me. If that does not work for you, tell me what would and I will consider it. Thanks, Dana Reyes, founder, Example Co.

Notice what is missing. No paragraph explaining your startup, because the owner does not care. No claim that the name is not worth much, which reads as an opening insult and hardens the price. No "what would you be willing to accept for it", which hands the anchor to the other side and costs you a full round of negotiation to climb back down from.

Sign it with a real name and a real company. Anonymous offers get read as tire kicking, and the whole transaction runs on the other person believing you will actually pay.

What to offer, and where to stop

Reported 2024 to 2025 aftermarket data put the average sale around $2,345 and the median around $549. Use the median. A handful of enormous sales pull the average up every year and they tell you nothing about the two word .com in front of you.

Open at roughly half to two thirds of your genuine ceiling. Decide that ceiling before you send anything, write it down, and treat it as real. The reason to be disciplined here is not thrift, it is that the second best name on your shortlist is nearly always available for less than the amount you would overpay for the first one, and it will serve the business just as well once customers have seen it twice.

Expect silence on the first message. That is the normal outcome, not a rejection. Send one follow up after two weeks with a slightly higher number in it, and if that also goes unanswered, stop. Buyers who keep pushing past that point tend to talk themselves into paying a multiple of what they planned.

Red flags worth walking away from

A domain sale between strangers has an obvious failure mode: someone has to move first. Escrow solves it by holding your funds until the name is confirmed in your account. Anyone trying to route around that is telling you something.

• A discount for skipping escrow. The saving is always smaller than the amount you are risking, and this is the most common way domain buyers lose money.
• Payment by wire, crypto or a friends and family transfer. All chosen for the same reason, which is that you cannot reverse them.
• A seller who cannot demonstrate control of the name. Ask them to add a specific DNS record or change a nameserver. A real owner does it in five minutes.
• Sudden urgency. Another buyer who appears the moment you show interest, and disappears the moment you ask for escrow.

A legitimate seller has no reason to avoid an escrow agent. It protects them from a reversed payment exactly as much as it protects you from a name that never arrives.

Then plan for the 60 day lock

One thing that surprises first time buyers after the money has changed hands. ICANN's Transfer Policy, in force since 1 December 2016, locks a domain against transfer to a different registrar for 60 days after a change of registrant. You own the name and can use it immediately, point the nameservers wherever you like and set up email on day one. You just cannot move it to your preferred registrar yet. ICANN has approved recommendations that replace this rule with a shorter lock, so check the current position with your registrar rather than assuming.

That window is a good time to do the work that actually matters, which is putting something on the name. A domain sitting on a parking page earns nothing back, and the gap between buying the name and having a site standing on it is where most of the momentum gets lost, so it is worth having a real site built and live the same week rather than months later.

When to stop chasing and buy the alternative

The hardest part of this is not tactics, it is knowing when the name you wanted is not going to happen. If the owner has not replied to two messages over a month, or has quoted a price several times your ceiling, that is the answer. Nothing in your remaining toolkit changes it, and a broker will charge you 10 to 20 percent to deliver the same news more slowly.

Waiting for the name to expire is not the escape hatch it looks like either. A common gTLD takes roughly 75 days to travel from expiry through grace, redemption and pending delete, the owner can renew at any point in that window, and large registrars route their own expiring inventory into their own auctions so a desirable name is sold internally rather than reaching the public drop. Our comparison of domain backorder alternatives covers what still works there and what does not.

At that point the most valuable thing you can do is look at names that are already for sale with the price on the card, where the only question left is whether you like it. Plenty of strong two word domains and brandable domains sit well under the median, and every transfer runs through escrow so the awkward part of a private deal never comes up at all.