Domains Can Now Advertise They Are for Sale in DNS — and It Changes Everything

Domains Can Now Advertise They're for Sale in DNS — and It Changes Everything

A new RFC just made it possible for any domain to declare "I'm for sale" directly in its DNS records. No parking pages, no broker listings, no cold emails to privacy-shielded WHOIS contacts. Just a single TXT record.

The RFC 10023 Standard

Published in July 2026 as RFC 10023 (Informational), the _for-sale DNS convention is elegantly simple. A domain owner adds a TXT record at _for-sale.example.com:

_for-sale IN TXT "v=FORSALE1;furi=https://example.com/for-sale"

That's it. The record carries a mandatory version tag and at most one tag=value pair from a small set:

• furi= — Contact or information URI (e.g., mailto:[e-mail])
• ftxt= — Free human-readable text (e.g., eligibility criteria)
• fval= — Asking price in a specific currency (e.g., EUR2500.00)
• fcod= — Proprietary code for pre-arranged transactions

The domain keeps serving its website, email keeps flowing, and the record can be added or removed at will. The homepage is unaffected. No visitor sees a "for sale" page. The signal is invisible to humans browsing the site — it's designed for machines: brokers, availability services, and automated domain acquisition tools.

Why This Matters

The signal a domain owner most wants to send is the one there has never been a channel for. If you're willing to sell your domain, the interested buyer has no way to learn that — short of a cold email to a WHOIS contact that privacy redaction has probably removed.

This creates a peculiar market failure: willing sellers and willing buyers exist, but they can't find each other. Inquiries that would have been welcome never arrive, and the ones that do arrive are indistinguishable from spam.

Putting the signal in DNS rather than on the page is what makes it useful to the parties who can act on it. A broker or availability service checking a name resolves it anyway — one extra lookup tells them what a rendered page could not, because nothing on a working homepage says "the domain under this is negotiable."

What This Is Not

The wrong belief to clear first is that this is a way of parking a domain. It's close to the opposite. Parking replaces the site with a sales page, which costs you every visitor the domain still has. _for-sale sits beside a live site in DNS and says nothing to a browser.

It's also not the same thing as registration data. WHOIS and RDAP answer "is this name registered?" A registered name may still be purchasable, and an unregistered one may not be worth having. That gap — between "registered" and "available for purchase" — is the whole reason the convention exists.

How to Check for _for-sale Records

Anyone can check with a simple DNS query:

# Using dig
dig TXT _for-sale.example.com

# Using host
host -t TXT _for-sale.example.com

# Using Python
import dns.resolver
answer = dns.resolver.resolve('_for-sale.example.com', 'TXT')
for rdata in answer:
    print(rdata)

If the domain has a _for-sale record, you'll get back the version tag and contact information. If not, you'll get NXDOMAIN — the record simply doesn't exist.

Implications for Domain Tools

For domain availability services — like the ones checking 500+ TLDs in seconds — this convention opens a new dimension. Currently, these tools answer one question: "Is this domain registered?" With _for-sale, they can answer a second: "Is this registered domain available to buy?"

This means domain checking tools can now surface three states instead of two:

1. Available — not registered, can be registered at standard price
2. Taken — registered, no _for-sale record, not known to be for sale
3. For sale — registered, has _for-sale record, available for purchase at specified terms

This is a meaningful improvement for anyone searching for the right domain name. Instead of hitting a wall when their preferred name is taken, they can immediately see if it's for sale and at what price.

The Broader Pattern

The _for-sale convention is part of a broader trend of moving signaling into DNS — the infrastructure layer that every internet-connected service already queries. Rather than building new platforms or marketplaces, this approach uses the existing DNS infrastructure that has been running the internet for four decades.

Other examples of this pattern include:

• DMARC/SPF/DKIM for email authentication
• CAA records for certificate authority authorization
• DNSSEC for DNS response integrity
• _dmarc, _sip, _xmpp SRV records for service discovery

Each of these started as a convention and became infrastructure. _for-sale is at the beginning of that journey.

What This Means for Domain Owners

If you own a domain you'd consider selling, adding a _for-sale record is free, takes seconds, and doesn't disrupt anything. You can set a price, provide a contact URI, and wait for interested parties to find you through their normal domain research workflows.

For domain buyers and brokers, this eliminates the guesswork. Instead of sending speculative emails that look like spam, you can programmatically check whether a domain is for sale before reaching out — and know the asking price before you start the conversation.

Conclusion

RFC 10023's _for-sale DNS convention is a small change with outsized implications. It bridges the gap between domain registration data and domain marketability, using infrastructure that already exists. For the domain industry, it could be as transformative as when DNS itself replaced hosts files — a quiet infrastructure change that reshapes how the market works.

The next time you check if a domain is available and find it's taken, look for a _for-sale record. The owner might be more willing to negotiate than you think — and now there's a standard way to find out.