Does anyone regularly check websiteproperties.com?

[Clinton]

WebsiteProperties seems to stock the type of websites that are few and far between in the marketplaces which are dominated by turnkey and cookiecutter sites.

Does anyone regularly check this site and what do you think of what they have to offer?

[DomainMagnate]

Never saw this, but added to my bookmarks now, thanks

[Fergal]

A new one on me. Bookmarked and I've started following them on Twitter.

[benitez17]

I check it from time to time and have done some basic investigation into a few sites listed there, but I feel like it is a better place to sell a site than buy one, if you know what I mean.

[Clinton]

benetiz17, you hit the nail on the head. The owner used to post in Sitepoint in their early days and he used to drum up business by telling people he'd get them higher multiples. I know of cases where he has delivered that. A recent sale of his that I have inside information on (I was commissioned to do the due diligence) involved a site that sold for well over 40x.

We need to get it into context though. The average Flippa seller won't benefit from moving all his business over to this site. The businesses here tend to have substantial investment in property, intellectual property, staff, customer lists etc. The more similar they are to Bricks and Mortar businesses the more their multiples are going to reflect the lower risk profile of large, established offline businesses and the type of prices those businesses sell for.

[mpcovcd]

Clinton basically you mean real established websites of the internet right? Haha just kidding but I've been visiting the site from time to time, its not very active which is a bummer since he does turn up alot of great websites.

[benitez17]

Clinton, thanks for the inside info. I am skeptical of some of the prices for sites listed as sold on there, but if do ever want to sell a site, I'd probably go there before Flippa.

I agree that the sites listed there are more like businesses than just a website, and I would probably check it more often if it looked like it were updated more often or was more user friendly.

[Clinton]

Sadly, they've no idea what user friendly is. But considering the number of listings they tend to have on at any given time, do they really need the Flippa type search functionality?

It would certainly be a lot more interesting if it were updated more often. Maybe David Fairley should join the discussion here and brainstorm on Luke's thread to attract quality sites to the marketplace. I did drop him an email about this to the private email address I've used in past communications and he said he'd drop in. If he's the savvy chap I think he is, he'll register and start talking.

[nEquity]

They ar ein a different league, selling sites in the millions of dollers.

These guy are like proper business brokers and when buying at those values you gotta expect proper due diligence, like an investment banking acquisition undergoes. Meeting owners even and all that, not sending some payment through escrow for a 4 mil$ site!

Infact if I was buying something through there I'd be hiring my firm's (big 4 accounting firm) corporate finance department to conduct due diligence, not anyone on here, no offence.

[Clinton]

With the greatest of respect to your "big 4 accounting firms", they'll probably do a great job on the books but when it comes to investigating the main assets of a web business - the website, coding, domain portfolio etc., - you may find them a bit lacking. How hot are they on analysing traffic logs and SEO / PPC campaigns, on recognising major security flaws with the server or how clean a database list is?

I saw a recent DD done by one of the big boys where they screwed up, saw a privacy WHOIS and just assumed that the seller was the true owner. Things got pretty messy after exchange of contracts I can tell you.

And when snapnames.com was bought for $25 million the buyers trusted someone like that to do their DD. Result? A huge embarrasment and a massive loss of money when it later transpired that one of the ex-directors had been shill bidding on up to 5% of the business that went through the company.