domain brokers - What happens when you contract a domain broker to sell your domain?

We have recently contracted a company called domain holdings in Florida - http://www.domainholdings.com/ - to sell some of our TLD top level domain names and I was wondering about a few things:

1. We have given them 60 days to sell our most valuable domains and we have heard hardly anything from them - is this normal? What is the likely hood that they will actually sell any of our domains as we agreed not to market them elsewhere for that duration. There is another 30 days after that in which they will still want money if the domains are sold even if they don't sell them which seems rather odd so we are actually losing three months. Starting to wish we hadn't signed that now.

2. How do they come up with the values they come up with? The agreement for selling the domains had minimum prices against each domain but when we look at their holding page it just says 'orders in excess of $1000 US on domains they agreed to sell for not less than $55,000 which seems rather unprofessional?

3. What are the implications if they don't sell them - is there a better way to find buyers for our domains than outsourcing the brokerage? Would it be better if we went straight to the relevant vertical market rather than use them?

4. What is the best place to find a likely buyer? Is it worth using Flippa or eBay or some other domain brokers? Surely people must be looking for domain names all the time but where do I find them?

Many thanks in advance for any help anyone can give!!

Domain brokers require careful choice and to pick the correct domain broker is not always easy. If a domain name has been registered for a long time and is a top-level domain (TLD) from one or two words then the choice of broker - or even if you need a broker - is not so hard but a good broker to sell a three word domain name or a less saleable domain is more important.

If you have a domain and a price in mind you can be surprised how difficult it is to find a buyer. We have recently been reselling a large domain stock on behalf of a domain investment group and so we have hundreds of domains listed in our portfolio. However many of these domains were not really worth registering on our eyes and so we agreed with the owner - who had been trying to sell them on for the three previous years - that we would drop everything but the .com and .co.uk (it was a UK company) from the list and allow them to expire. Of course they were not pleased at this idea as this represented over ninety percent of their portfolio and previous investment. The major mistake they had made in my view was that they had bought a lot of .info, .co and .mobi domains that were simply not good enough. These domains had been purchased a little too late and (because the industry realised it had undersold the .com and other TLD domains) very expensive to maintain. We therefore stipulated that we would only sell those domains we felt had intrinsic value so that we could focus or efforts on them. This is an important point - domain brokers must agree in writing to be proactive - they must not just be freeloaders who add the domain to a website that displays a 'this domain may be for sale' message at the top as if you had put it on SEDO or similar. Your domain brokers must be connected to people who might want to buy your domain in some way and they must also be prepared to get on the phone and cold call and they must be good at it.

The other thing I would say is that the brokerage of your domain names must be in the country that your domain is most suited for and must be able to speak that language well.

All of these factors greatly influence whether or not your domain brokers might make a sale and that is important. By the time you've signed on the dotted line you are stuck with paying the maintenance for your domain all the time they in control and you will be losing money!