Are going up. Way up. — Domain sales

Just ask the firm that handles a good portion of the private transactions.

Afternic and Sedo release weekly sales notes that are noted by a number of domain blogs. DNJournal aggregates notes from these sources and others.

But at the end of the day, public sales figures probably account for regarding 10% of the domain sales market.

A lot of private sales take place with the help of Escrow.com. The majority of domain transactions the firm handles are with end users, and that means most of the transactions it handles are never made public. Its results are a good barometer for what’s going on in the market.

So I reached out to Escrow.com President Brandon Abbey to find out what he’s seeing so far in 2012. He told me the year is off to an incredible start.

Escrow.com’s year-to-date domain transactions are up 29% compared to the same period in 2011. Dollar volume is up a staggering 45% with the average transaction size up 13%.

I don’t think this is a case of Escrow.com winning more of the market share. It’s by now the runaway leader for pureplay domain escrow transactions.

Although .com still dominates, Abbey states that ccTLD transactions are up significantly this year compared to last.

This is all good news for domain name investors.