Escrow.com published its domain report for Q1 2026.

“Investors are hoarding raw digital land at a pace not seen in years, driving blank domain names to be worth more than fully developed websites for the first time on record.

This historic market flip comes as total quarterly transaction volume at Escrow.com jumped 25% to $128 million, marking the platform’s biggest overall trading period since early 2023.

The company also rolled out its inaugural IPv4 Investment Index this week, tracking a massive, parallel supply crunch happening deep inside the internet’s backbone infrastructure.”

• Total transaction volume: $128M (+25% QoQ)
• .com transaction volume: $70M → $89M (+27%, new all-time high)
• .ai transaction volume: $10.3M → $10.0M (-3%)
• Mean price, exact-word .com: $287k → $402k (+40%)
• U.S. buyer volume: $82.4M → $105.8M (+28%)
• Median, no-content vs with-content domains: $5,369 vs $4,000 (first time on record)
• Volume on domains without content: 94% of total dollar volume

The opening quarter of the year saw a total reversal in how buyers value online property.

The median price for a domain name without active content climbed to $5,369. At the same time, fully built websites suffered a steep slide, dropping from a $7,500 median late last year down to just $4,000.

This stark divergence meant that a massive 94% of the quarter’s total dollar volume went straight into completely empty inventory, showing that market players are strictly focused on securing raw digital real estate.

“We are watching a total realignment of the digital real estate market,” Escrow.com Chief Executive Matt Barrie said. “Buyers are bypassing developed websites entirely and putting their capital directly into raw web inventory because they want clean, premium assets they can build on from scratch.”

Traditional .com domains drove almost all of this new market growth, completely outpacing alternative extensions. The legacy .com TLD hit a brand new all-time record of $89 million in quarterly transaction volume, up 27% over the previous three months.

Buyers paid an enormous premium for dictionary-perfect names, which pushed the mean price of an exact English word on .com up 40% to hit $402,000 – marking the highest mean transaction value the category has seen since the 2021 market peak.

“The fact that .ai is consolidating right at a ten-million-dollar floor shows it has moved past being a trend and is now solidifying into everyday infrastructure,” Barrie noted. “At the same time, this quarter shows why .com remains the gold standard. Securing a category-defining dictionary word on .com gives businesses a permanent advantage that fundamentally drops their marketing and customer acquisition costs over the long run.”

Meanwhile, those alternative extensions took a brief breather. Volume for .ai domains eased slightly by 3% to settle at $10 million, signaling a consolidation phase after nearly two straight years of record-breaking expansion. Brokers note this is simply base-building at a structurally higher floor, given that the extension’s volume is still roughly triple what it was this time last year.