I am about to teach you a method that can save you a lot of money. I didn’t invent this method, but when I read it, it sounds so logical, so I started to implement it, and it works. It is a very simple but yet powerful that every professional buyer must use.

Let’s say you looking to buy a webmasters forum website. You can go to Sitepoint or any other website that offers websites for sale and search for ‘webmasters forum’ or similar search terms.

If we will stick with Sitepoint for a moment you will get a list of sites that are on auction. Check it yourself – The first one is me when I sold webmastersroom.com

Now take a look on the second result:

Looking to buy any webmaster forums/ web design or programming forums or any related domains

This is much better than to bid on auction. Why?

First sellers approach you so you can choose between several websites.

It also gives you the power to negotiate better. If they approached you it means that they are keen to sell. And you are the only buyer at the moment. So you can knocked down the price heavily. Of course that 80% will be crap, but still using this method gives you at least 5 websites to choose from.

Now if you decide to bid on an auction you compete against other buyers that will raise the price you are willing to pay. You also have to wait for the auction to ends, and there is no room for negotiation.

On the real world you can get bargains on auctions, but not with websites. The amount of quality websites that are out for sale is very low, and the competition is high. In fact I stopped bidding completely, because for every website that I wanted to buy and bid for it, I was outbid by someone, and the closing price was higher than I wanted to pay, or even worst higher than what the site is really worths.

Now I have some messages in relevant forums like:

“looking to buy…” and I get 5-10 offers a day. Now all I need is to chose from.

Have a great weekend,

Assaf

Have a look here: http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/20371

This is a very good site that generates a lot of leads per month. But this is not what I want to talk about. Look at the bidding history:

• 22 Feb 2008 05:39

  $120,000 – chip2447

• 19 Feb 2008 12:08

  $80,500 (Private)

• 17 Feb 2008 03:39

  $80,000 (Private)

I can understand that someone has decided to raise his bid by $500 (the second one) but it is beyond me to understand why user name chip2447 has decided to raise the bar to $120,000 4 hours before the end of the auction. It is not that there are 10 bidders that are fighting for this website.

It is a lot of money to put, and I don’t think that many buyers have this sort of money. Apart of that, to run this website you need to be a lawyer , and again this limits the cometetion.

So why do raise the price to $120k? I really don’t know…

Assaf

It is about time that someone will offer a good system for webmasters to trade their sites.

We came with a very good auctions system that should answer all sellers and buyers needs.

Some of the features are very impressive:

1) For the first time you can rate the buyer and the seller like Ebay. No one offer this yet.

2) User can choose to verified their account, by paying a small fee from their paypal account.

3) 8 Categories, so it easy to find what you are looking for. We will add more according to the demand.

4) You can upload pictures and even a media file like small video.

5) It is almost free. You can post a new auction for free. All we charge is 1% from the final price. So if you didn’t sell you don’t have to pay. This is only fair.

We do hope to see here many auction, and we believe that this site is offering you the best solution for buying ans selling website.

If you have more suggestions and request please feel free to contact us.

Enjoy!

I really wanted to buy this website:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/9970

I put a bid 2 hours before ending for $510 – according to Sitepoint rules if you put a bid less then 4 hours till the end, they extend the auction with another 4 hours. At the time I put the bid it was 17:00 local time. My bid triggered a mini war, with someone bid for $600 and I response with $620. Then someone bid for $640 and immediately I raised my bid to $650.

15 minutes later someone bid for $700. This was my limit, but I thought to give it one more chance. So I put a $720 bid. By the time I did so, it was already 21:00, so the auction new end date was 01:00 – because I was tired, and already reached my limit I’ve decided to go to sleep around 23:00 knowing that I am the higher bidder…

So first thing in the morning I’ve checked my emails to see that someone outbid me by $20 and got the website for $740… It is a shame after all the efforts I put… but it is a good website with some potential, so good luck to the buyer!

Assaf