A closed Portland bar's .com reached $5,001, four times its valuation
Expatriate served its last drinks in February. On Saturday its domain went from $1,575 to $5,001 in the final four hours.
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Expatriatepdx.com was the web address of Expatriate, a cocktail bar in Portland, Oregon, that closed in February. On Saturday the name was at auction on GoDaddy, where 38 bids took the last price we observed to $5,001. GoDaddy's own valuation of the name was $1,233.
The bar had a reputation. It opened across the street from Beast, a Portland restaurant run by the same people, and Beast's website still lists it as "our cocktail bar" with a link to the domain. Portland Monthly called it the city's best new bar in 2013, and in February Eater Portland reported that it had closed, with February 8 as its last day of service.
Most of the money arrived in the last four hours of the auction. At 15:54 UTC on Saturday the bid stood at $1,575; at 19:51, a minute before the scheduled end, it was $5,001. The bid count rose far less than the price over those hours, which looks like a few bidders raising each other near the end.
The likeliest draw is the links. GoDaddy's listing shows 267 referring domains, meaning 267 separate websites have linked to expatriatepdx.com at some point: reviews, listings, city guides. The bar's customers are gone, but the links still count with search engines, and that is what an SEO buyer pays for.
Domain Name Wire saw the same pattern in January 2023 with MezzanineSF.com, the name of a San Francisco music venue that had closed. It reached $7,800 at GoDaddy with 909 referring domains, and the site still ranked for more than 200 keywords with nothing on it.
The automated valuation prices the words, and "expatriate" and "pdx" are ordinary words. The bidders look to have priced the links instead. When a closed business's name comes up at auction, the referring-domain count is the number to check before the appraisal.
As ever, $5,001 is a last observed bid: nobody has confirmed who bid, whether they paid or whether the name transferred.
The week's biggest names were elsewhere. The table shows the eight highest last observed bids among the names we tracked from October 13 to 20 (UTC), and the full results show the rest.
| Domain | Last observed bid | Bids | Marketplace | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jiudian.com | $77,000 | 129 | DropCatch | 15 Oct |
| 7121.com | $32,508 | 125 | GoDaddy | 14 Oct |
| 6364.com | $28,500 | 94 | GoDaddy | 14 Oct |
| qda.com | $26,016 | 60 | Dynadot | 17 Oct |
| 7570.com | $25,000 | 107 | GoDaddy | 13 Oct |
| mzs.com | $19,002 | 61 | GoDaddy | 14 Oct |
| mannequin.com | $16,916 | 69 | GoDaddy | 18 Oct |
| 9135.com | $15,250 | 63 | GoDaddy | 14 Oct |
Our observations can come before the end of bidding, so a later report can differ.
Thanks for reading. The next issue is on Tuesday 27 October.
Andrew
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