Gregg McNair is back in the news for the 2nd Monday in a row by joining with another huge name from the domain industry to form a new venture.
Last week it was Ken Hansen that left Neustar to join Greg McNair and in the Co.com registry and today its long time veteran in of Escrow.com Andee Hill who left Escrow.com last week to join Mr. McNair in a new online escrow company EscrowHill.com which is based in New Zealand that was formed to compete with Escrow.com.
The press release goes on to chat about two other now ex-escrow.com staff who are moving over to EscrowHill.com, Ryan Bogue who has been named General Manager and Donald Hendrickson named Operations Manager.
At TRAFFIC Ammar Kubba announced that his company was going to also launch a competitor to Escrow.com named Agreed.com.
Although Ammar is a very good friend and a partner with me on a few domains, I honestly told him even if he was going to bring something really innovative to the escrow business I though he would have a hard time gaining market share against escrow.com and I feel the same for EscrowHill.com
When I sat with Ammar and his team at TRAFFIC they showed me the Agreed.com platform and I saw some potential innovation as far as domains which are sold under payment plans and leases. Agreed.com has a automated system in place which seems to handle such transactions, at least set them up in a better and more affordable way than to escrow.com.
I told him I would use Agreed.com the next time I had one of those transaction, which honestly is not often, however I told him I saw no reason to move from escrow.com
So I see several problems for these two new businesses, both EscrowHill.com and Agreed.com.
Escrow.com has handled a lot of transactions, for a very long time and for almost everyone who has ever bought or sold a domain name.
In my case Escrow.com has handled thousands of transactions involving tens of millions of dollars, and at the end of the day, they provide a basic an administrative function.
An online escrow company collects the money from the buyer, verifies the funds are good, tells the seller to transfer a domain, verifies the transfer is complete and then pays the seller.
The second problem I see is its the buyer that typically pays the escrow fee, so the cost of the escrow fee is pretty much irrelevant to me.…
