Buying a parked domain
 

I'd like to purchase a domain that is parked. It's my last name and it's not exactly smith.com so I can't imagine this person has tons of requests coming in. In fact, my name is fairly uncommon outside of, say, Germany, and even there it's not a very common name. The domain is parked through Fabulous and it asks me to make an offer when I express an interest. I don't know what people typically pay in these situations so I offered $25, but it was instantly rejected (seems the owner set a base price before offers are even considered).

Does anyone know what a normal price is to pay for a parked domain that is NOT in high demand (or even medium demand for that matter)?

The domain was registered in 2002 and expires in 2010 on the same date. Do people who park domains typically renew them, or could I benefit from paying the $20 to have GoDaddy monitor the domain and purchase it once the registration expires?

I can't comment on the parked prices. I can only comment for expired ones.

For 2 different domains I used snapnames.com to pick them up when they expired. I don't remember the first one and how much it finally closed in the auction.

The last one, I got for skogafoss, because she didn't want it to lose the opportunity to get it. I paid $250 for it during the auction. The challenge is that there are companies that just buy registered and then expired domains because they see that there is at least a single demand.

Snapnames auctions aren't like ebay where the last minute losses by sniping. They give the opportunity to everyone because it resets the timer and adds more time if there are last minute bids.

I really should have gotten my last name as a .com but at the time they were too expensive so I ended up settling for a .org which for some reason I actually like better.

good luck!

Yeah, those douche bags probably renew them because they think they're still going to make money. If you have a legitimate claim to the domain (like it is your name) and somebody is parked on it in bad faith, you can file a complaint with ICANN and possibly have it transferred to you. See ICANN | Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies If that doesn't work I don't think it would be entirely immoral to call up their registrar and do a little social engineering to take it over. I also advise against paying any money to GoDaddy, who will shut down your domain before doing as much as consulting you if you publish anything they decide don't like.

That's interesting regarding having a legitimate claim to the domain.

As for GoDaddy, that's only if you're using their hosting service, right? If I just use them to register the domain, what kind of control do they retain after that if I don't use them as a host?

That's the really sad part. They have been known to disable access to domains that weren't even hosted on their service but just as a registrar, due to extremely flimsy legal complaints from third parties. See Slashdot | MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site for an example, and there are more. They may have re-enabled service at a later time but that's beside the point. They have an extremely long record of abusing customers, and as a result, I had all my domain registrations transferred from them to Dreamhost. I can definitely recommend Dreamhost as a registrar; they even have free WHOIS masking.

OK, maybe I'm just blind but I can't find where to file a complaint with ICANN. Can anyone help me out here?

Maybe this? Complaint Form