Last year I was in a similar boat; after getting no response from the domain owner via email and postal mail (the phone number was either out-of-date or bogus), I enlisted the help of a domain brokerage service (Sedo).
The way it works is you pay for an "appraisal" of the domain, then they work on commission (a percentage of the eventual selling price of the domain).
The broker I worked with was able to get ahold of the domain owner, but the price they wanted was way out of line with reality. The broker claimed to have aggressively negotiated, and went back to the domain owner several times over the following months, but no sale was ever made. The commission-based compensation model seems to me to be an inherent conflict of interest, but my impression was that the broker was negotiating on my behalf in good faith.
Would be curious if anyone has a success story here. I know someone who used a different brokerage service (BuyDomains) to attempt to purchase a different domain, and were also unsuccessful - in that case the broker was also unable to reach the owner listed on WHOIS.
I considered using a domain broker but thought that they would take it for themselves if it was cheap.
I was not able to locate the owner because he did not answer emails to the whois address but he had the same whois info for other sites that were active. I went to one of those sites and was able to go get in contact with him. Price was ten times what I was willing to pay so I passed.
Inaccurate whois records are grounds for cancellation of a domain name. If you feel that the contact information is outdated or inaccurate, bring it up with ICANN. If the squatter is being lazy it may free up the domain.
Seriously. I've had similar experiences with squatters. If their business is selling these domains, it's just good business to keep WHOIS records up to date.
The way it works is you pay for an "appraisal" of the domain, then they work on commission (a percentage of the eventual selling price of the domain).
The broker I worked with was able to get ahold of the domain owner, but the price they wanted was way out of line with reality. The broker claimed to have aggressively negotiated, and went back to the domain owner several times over the following months, but no sale was ever made. The commission-based compensation model seems to me to be an inherent conflict of interest, but my impression was that the broker was negotiating on my behalf in good faith.
Would be curious if anyone has a success story here. I know someone who used a different brokerage service (BuyDomains) to attempt to purchase a different domain, and were also unsuccessful - in that case the broker was also unable to reach the owner listed on WHOIS.