Why it’s hard to know, who will sell you their number?

It's hard to know who will sell you their toll free number.
If you looked at a list of homes there’s no way to know just by looking at them who would be interested in or willing to sell you their home if you negotiated for it. But people are used to buying and selling their homes and they know roughly what their home is worth and whether they might have thought about moving. It’s also not too hard to tell who makes the decision most of the time and even if you can’t reach them at the home, you can look up who owns a piece of property in the town if necessary.

If you looked at a group of attractive girls there’s no way to know just by looking at them who would be interested or willing to go to the prom with you if you approached them properly. But girls would have thought about the prom a lot and they would know what you were talking about, and whether or not they were still available or not. It’s also very easy to know who makes the decision because you’re looking at her.

When you look at a list of phone numbers that someone gave you not only is there no way to know by looking at them who would be willing to sell you their number if you negotiated with them, but they have probably never thought about selling their phone number, they wouldn’t know how much it was worth, how to do it, or whether they could get another number or not. And on top of that it’s very hard to know who makes the decision in many cases.

Add to the mix, that there’s no whois lookup or town hall you can go to look up who owns the number. Even in a medium sized company it’s also very hard to find out who is responsible for that and to get them to make a decision. That’s why it’s so much harder than people would realize or appreciate to answer the question, “Is it possible to buy that number or any of these numbers?”

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    7 Comments »

    James says:
    September 6, 2008 at 12:33 am

    There needs to be a Phone Number Market. A place where people can go to sell or purchase a phone number. I suppose life is hard until someone makes it easier…

      Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
      September 6, 2008 at 6:39 pm

      Even if there was, it wouldn’t make it any easier to see which numbers where available off the typical wish list, because most numbers wouldn’t be listed there even if there was a popular site for that.

      Take the MLS for example. That’s certainly a very thorough list of available homes, but that doesn’t make it any easier to tell which homes are possible to buy if you contacted and negotiated with them. Even as popular as the MLS is it wouldn’t help.

      There’s also an even bigger problem with your suggestion, the FCC. The FCC has regulations against hoarding and brokering numbers so even if someone contacts me with a great number, we can’t really act as a broker and try to sell it for someone.

      That’s why we’re really not trying to be a central place to buy and sell toll free numbers as I think you’re describing. We’re more like the GoDaddy of the phone number business, just doing a good job as a registrar instead of just leaving that up to the hosting companies who do a lousy job of it.

      Bill

        Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
        September 26, 2008 at 10:20 pm

        I think the reason I had to write this article is because some people seem to assume that everyone and everything has a price tag hidden somewhere.

          Bill Schley says:
          January 10, 2009 at 12:59 am

          Hello, I have an 800 number which I don’t use .

          Would you buy it or do you have buyers?

          1-800-488-0758

          Regards
          Bill Schley

            Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
            January 10, 2009 at 9:22 am

            Hi Bill,

            Unfortunately it’s only worth a few buck and the effort to transfer it individually probably negates the few bucks it would be worth. Sorry!

            Bill

              Jason says:
              January 21, 2009 at 10:09 am

              so basically i need this number (18004486479) for my business and it’s been out of service for about 2 years… there’s no way to find out who has it so i can contact them… Basically that’s all that was said above correct?

                Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
                January 21, 2009 at 12:14 pm

                No, it explains why it’s harder than you would expect. It doesn’t say there’s no way to contact them. It says there’s no easy way to contact them.

                There’s a whole section of our site that explains how to dig deeper when a number isn’t available at http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/consulting/ and here’s a page that summarizes it:
                http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/content/consulting/digging-deeper-simplified-2.html

                And here’s a page that explains why a number may be active in the database but not in use when you call it:
                http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/blogs/search/called-it.html

                I hope that helps a little better.

                Bill

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