Tracking Domain ROI Without a Spreadsheet Meltdown

Ask a domain investor whether their portfolio is profitable and you'll usually get a story about a good sale rather than a number. That's not evasion — most genuinely don't know, because nobody tracks the boring side.

It takes one spreadsheet and about ten minutes a month.

The six fields

For every domain you own, record:

| Field | Why it matters | | --- | --- | | Domain | Obviously | | Acquired date | Lets you calculate hold time | | Acquisition cost | Including auction fees, not just the bid | | Channel | Hand-reg, closeout, auction, private — tells you which channel actually works for you | | Renewal cost | Usually standard, but premium renewals need flagging | | Status | Active / listed / sold / dropped |

Then for anything that sells, four more:

| Field | Why it matters | | --- | --- | | Sold date | Hold time, and seasonality if you ever get enough data | | Gross price | The headline | | Commission | The part people forget | | Net proceeds | The only number that's actually yours |

That's it. Ten columns.

Why net, not gross

Because the gap is bigger than instinct suggests. Two of my own sales:

• PeakCovers.com — $3,246 gross, 25% commission, $2,434.50 net
• BankBrewing.com — $1,297 gross, 10% commission, $1,167.30 net

If you track gross, you'd record $4,543 for those two. You actually received $3,601.80. Track it wrong for a few years and your sense of the business is off by 20%.

The four numbers to calculate annually

Once a year — renewal season is the natural moment — work these out.

1. Sell-through rate

sales this year ÷ average portfolio size

Mine: three sales across roughly 250 names in the first eight months of 2026, about 1.8% annualized. If yours is far below 1%, the problem is inventory quality or distribution, not luck.

2. Average net sale price

total net proceeds ÷ number of sales

The number that decides whether scaling helps or hurts.

3. Annual carrying cost

portfolio size × average renewal

The one almost nobody calculates. It's your cost of being in this business, and seeing it in a single figure changes renewal decisions.

4. True ROI on sold names

Not just gross over acquisition — include every renewal paid while holding.

HarborPointHomes.com: bought under $100 in April 2023, sold for $3,000 about three years later. Three renewals at roughly $12 means about $136 all-in, for $3,000 gross. Even after commission that's a return well over 15×.

Compare that to a name bought for $12 that sits ten years and gets dropped: $132 in, nothing out. Both are real outcomes, and only tracking shows you the ratio between them.

Getting the data out

Most registrars offer a CSV export of your portfolio. That's your starting spreadsheet — domain, registration date, expiry date, auto-renew status — and you add the acquisition and sale columns yourself.

Do this at least annually. It's also how you get your list into the portfolio triage tool to score everything in bulk before renewal decisions.

If your registrar makes exporting difficult, that's worth knowing about your registrar.

The questions tracking lets you answer

Once you have two or three years of data, you can answer things most investors can only guess at:

• Which channel should I buy from? The one with the best sell-through, not the one that feels productive.
• Which niches actually sell? You'll likely find one or two carrying everything.
• What's my real hold time? Changes how you think about renewals entirely.
• Am I profitable? Total net proceeds minus total acquisition minus total renewals. One subtraction.
• Should I scale? Only if average net × sell-through beats renewal cost.

Keep it simple

The failure mode isn't a bad system, it's an elaborate one you abandon. A Google Sheet with ten columns that you actually update beats a beautiful database you stop touching in March.

Two habits make it stick:

1. Log every acquisition the day you make it. Retrofitting acquisition costs a year later is miserable and you'll approximate, which defeats the point.
2. Log every sale immediately, including the commission, while the numbers are in front of you.

Everything else can wait for the annual review.

The uncomfortable part

When you first calculate this properly, there's a reasonable chance the answer is that you're down. Most portfolios are, especially in the first few years — that's the base rate the whole business runs on.

That's fine, and it's better than not knowing. A portfolio you're measuring gets pruned, repriced, and steered. A portfolio you're not measuring just accumulates renewals while you remember the good sale and forget the four hundred names that produced nothing.