Does anyone regularly check websiteproperties.com?

[benitez17]

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.

They probably don't need a search functionality, and I realize that it can only be updated as often as he gets a new listing, but a way to screen out all of the sold listings and/or sort by listing date would be a huge improvement. I hope the owner of the site signs up here. It would be nice to have contributions from a broker like him to get a different perspective on things.

[nEquity]

Actually you are quite right clinton. Really needs to be a firm that has some experience or specialisation in that sort of thing. I guess on the regular business side of things they would be good, verifying incomes and what not, since thats always my greatest worry, that whats purported there is a true and fair representation.

But as you mention on that side of things you make a very valid point. I can imagine there are some big 4's that do a lot of work in the tech field that would be good at this. Theres got to be quite a market for these specialised DD services, anyone want to get in on it?

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.

[Clinton]

I'm going to start a thread on that actually.

<added> Thread started