Help me find the best way to sell a mid/high value domain, which auction site/service

[Adverted]

One of our businesses is closing down this year and we are liquidating the assets, including its domain. But could use some input from the wiser group as a whole. So please hope you can help.

The domain is a 3 letter .com, its never been for sale publicly and is mildly popular acronym. We have had a lot of people contacting us about the name in the past and know of a couple people from within the same business field that are interested in it. So we have some bidders lined up on the name plus there are another 1,600 businesses we know of that all tie back into this domain/acronym.

The question to you all is how best to handle this sale, offline bids, online bids in a private/non-public auction system or using one of the more traditional public auction sites (sedo, afternic, ebay, ???). Since we have some people already interested and know the other 1,600+ businesses we thought it might be just easy to reach out to them. We know all their names and emails, so that is why we thought a private auction might work, but I've always been a buyer and mainly via this forum so selling a higher value name is new for me.

Any help on that would be great, thanks!

One more question is since its so hard to gauge value on a 3 letter .com we are going to get appraisals from Sedo, Afternic, and GoDaddy. Are there any other major companies we should think about getting an appraisal from? The goal of these appraisals is to help the bidders as a lot of the people we know interested within this business area are relatively new to domains. So we trying to make them educated as they have the money and will get the value out of the name, just want them to know going in what they're getting into. We also planned to list out all the 3 letter .com's that sold in the past, with stats on average pricing and such, again just trying to help the bidders.

Any other ideas or thoughts would be great.

 

[katherine]

Paid appraisals are pointless. They lack credibility.

You don't need one, definitely not for a LLL.com. A LLL.com will sell for 3K minimum and that's reseller price.
There are enough reported sales of LLL.com to have an idea of what they can fetch on the market.

Since you already have a list of potentially interested persons, I would set up an auction on a designated marketplace - could be Sedo/Greatdomains - then notify all of them and drive them into a bidding war.
In theory you could just take the offers and host the auction yourself but it is more transparent to do that on a domain marketplace. Plus, additional bidders can join. Now you need to be aware of the possible limitations and gotchas.
If you use Sedo for example, buyers will need to be certified in order to bid above 10K. I have seen domains underselling because the spending power of the bidders was 'capped'.
Also set a reserve that makes you happy.