What is the average price?

"What is the average price to 'buy' a toll free number from an existing customer?" That sounds like simple enough question. Unfortunately it's not like your house. There is no book value or market rate that you can look up like you can a house or a car. The value of a toll free number is much more subjective, meaning it depends on how it's used by the current owner as well as how it could be used by the purchaser or other potential purchasers.

When a number is only really important to one buyer it becomes even more depedent on what they want or think about it. That is especially true for company names that don't mean very much to anyone else. Generic terms can be measured more against other transactions than fanciful names.

The best advice I can give to someone trying to pursue this is to take your time, because if you're in a hurry and try to go to fast it make you look more desperate and gives the other party the upper hand in the negotiations. And you also have to go into it with the realization that your goal is to make a friend as much as anything else. Picture if a friend of yours from school found out that you had a number and he wanted to start a business around it. You'd almost certainly sell it to him for a fraction of what you'd try to get from a large company. So don't come into this with a big company attitude, just try to make a friend and take your time. Unfortunately we don't always have time, but at least knowing that may help a little.

The other thing that makes that a very hard question to answer is that you really have to do all of the work to complete the deal just to be sure what it will ultimately cost you and if they'll ultimately go through with it and be willing to sell it to you. That fact, plus the fact that there's no centralized list of transactions the way there is in real estate or cars for instance makes it very hard to answer that question.

I also like to tell people that when you only need one successful deal, the odds really don't matter very much. If you needed to close 10 deals then the closing rate would be relevant, but if you only want one number and therefore need to close just one deal the odds don't matter. It's like asking a girl out or to marry you. You only need to get one good one so t doesn't matter how many said no in the end or if the first one says yes. You just keep looking until you find the right one. You don't need to find 10 right partners, just one. Hopefully at least one at a time, anyway.