Brokers

Brokers are another source of websites that you can purchase. In fact, I would say that they’re the next best source. This doesn’t mean a lot, though, as it’s significantly behind marketplaces in terms of effectiveness.

Brokers are essentially businesses that function very similarly to marketplaces, with one major difference — they’re heavily managed by the broker.

Brokers tend to deal with a quality-over-quantity approach, working with each website owner directly to perform due diligence on, list, market, and sell websites. They’re essentially the real estate agents of the website market.

Overall, brokers do have a very important job, and they do a great job of it, too. Many of the websites that they deal are higher-ticket, and they work to make sure that both the buyer and seller are well-protected in the transaction so that nobody is scammed or left with a worthless property.

If you’re buying a website for $500,000, you’ll naturally want a neutral third party to officiate the transaction.

However, because of the above-mentioned facts, brokers are not optimal for what we’re looking to do.

First of all, many of the websites listed by brokers are on the pricier-end, tying up more capital and not presenting much of an opportunity for quick wins.

Second, they tend to take a large cut of all sales since they’re doing so much work. Empire Flippers, for example, takes a 15% commission on sales under $700,000. This incentivizes them to sell websites for as much money as possible, severely reducing or eliminating the existence of undervalued websites.

Finally, the people that tend to list with these brokers, even smaller ones like MotionInvest, are very savvy towards website monetization and tend to fully-optimize their websites before listing. We want websites that are not optimized, so of course, this is not optimal.