Auction of domain names never happens Internet

Largest live auction of over 2600 real estate domain names at Fairmont Hotel in SF. Auctioneer is JPKing, which normally sells luxury homes and yachts never got off the ground and was finally cancelled. Largest live auction of over 2600 real estate domain names at Fairmont Hotel in SF. Auctioneer is JPKing, which normally sells luxury homes and yachts never got off the ground and was finally cancelled. Photo: Frederic Larson, The Chronicle Photo: Frederic Larson, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Auction of domain names never happens 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

A portfolio of more than 2,600 Internet domain names was almost auctioned off at the Fairmont on Nob Hill in San Francisco on Thursday.

But at the last minute, the buyers held back.

The few who showed up felt more comfortable negotiating in private - removing the sale from public view and scuttling what would have been one of the first - and probably classiest - live auctions of domain names in the history of the Internet.

"I still believe domain names are going to be the next Internet gold rush," said Scott King, executive vice president of sales for J.P. King Auction Co., the 94-year-old luxury auction house in Gadsden, Ala., that handled the sale.

J.P. King usually sells yachts and high-end real estate from the physical world and viewed this auction as an experiment. "The average American has just not thought about domain names yet," King said.

Sales of domain names are booming, according to Adam Dicker, a vice president at GoDaddy.com, because more people want to establish their presence on the Web. GoDaddy.com is conducting 2 million online auctions for names. Some names fetch good prices - auction.com sold recently for $1.7 million.

But live auctions of Internet domain names are still rare, especially for more specialized ones. In this case, they were real estate domain names.

The names that were for sale Thursday belong to Craig Harrison, an entrepreneur from Fort Collins, Colo., who has been carefully collecting them for 10 years. Many end in realestatelistings.com, and are interlinked, representing states, cities and suburbs in the United States and abroad.

Harrison wanted a live auction to attract upscale buyers and picked San Francisco for its proximity to Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Seattle.

He said he bought the first 500 or so names in December 1999, after his son, Craig Harrison Jr., then a college student, told him domain names would one day be valuable. Names had just been allowed to be more than 60 characters long, and there was a rush to buy them.

"I had to have the courage to keep spending the money," said Harrison, who remembers sitting at his computer for four days and using three or four credit cards. He spent about $35,000.

Interest in Thursday's auction was high, according to both Harrison and King. In the days leading up to the auction, the Web site got 5,000 hits, and J.P. King had e-mails and calls from interested buyers. But the event fizzled.

Perhaps the names weren't as valuable as they seemed. "Had we had premium names, like toys.com, there would have been an auction," King said as waiters in the Fairmont cleared trays piled with sandwiches from the empty room.

Or perhaps the recovery of the real estate market isn't as close as Harrison thought. On Thursday afternoon he had four buyers interested in joint ventures - which he can't auction - he said, but no one willing to take the risk and buy the names on their own.