3 weeks ago it was a huge surprise that projects.com was not renewed by its previous owner and the domain went to pending delete. Since the previous owner is a well-known internet entrepreneur, he should know the value of this domain, so most probably his e-mail contact in Whois was not working and he forgot about the expiry. This is the most possible scenario, especially because projects.com was not used for anything since 2008.
Of course there was high interest among domain investors to secure the domain. Snapnames was the one that was able to get it and there were about 200 initial bidders on the auction. Altogether, 16 different domainers made a bid over $10k. Just minutes after the bidding started, the price went over $20k and continued increasing until the final day of the auction. In the last minutes, the price crossed $80k. Although there were 4 bidders over this price mark, 3 bidders gave up at this point and the final price was $87,550.
So this was the success story part, however, 2 weeks after the auction is closed, the auction still shows “payment pending” status. I would at least start worrying if I were Snapnames. Additionaly, their auction for creditsolution.com that reached a $6,263 final price a month ago is also in pending payment.
My opinion is that – while being a great domain name – $87k is way too high as an auction price for projects.com. So if it keeps unpaid and had to be reauctioned, a new auction with calm bidders maybe reach about $30k making a huge loss to Snapnames.
