Visiting Flippa in Melbourne, Australia

Behind every internet firm there are some bricks and mortar. Here’s where Flippa lives.

My wife had one rule during our trip to Australia over the past two weeks: no business meetings.

Unfortunately for her (but good for me) I had by now scheduled one ahead of she put the rule in place.

So the prior week I rode the train to just north of downtown Melbourne to visit Flippa.

For the uninitiated, Flippa is to the web site selling business as Sedo and Afternic are to domain names.

Flippa is the largest marketplace for selling established web sites. Over the past week it has received nearly 8,000 bids and sold regarding $400,000 worth of web sites. Last year the firm sold almost $31 million worth of web sites; to date the firm has sold over $86 million.

Flippa shares a building with SitePoint and hot startup 99Designs. The firm started as part of the SitePoint Marketplace that launched in 2005. As the number of web site listings on the marketplace continued to grow, the firm decided to spin it out in 2009.

Although Flippa’s bread and butter is selling established web sites, it also lands some high profile domain name listings as well. Right now it has an auction for RomneyRyan.com that has garnered a lot of press. The ability to instantaneously create an auction for a domain name (albeit for a $29 listing fee) is one of the draws of Flippa compared to Sedo and Afternic.

As more and more domainers get into web site development, Flippa figures to play a bigger role in domainers’ businesses going forward.