How to get your hands on dropping .de domains

It has become a lot easier to get your hands on dropping .de (ccTLD of Germany) domains since the German registry Denic implemented a quarantine period last year, which they call RGP or Redemption Grace Period. Some of the bigger players in the ccTLD dropcatching market added .de to their services since then. One of those companies is the Dutch DomainOrder.com. 

DomainOrder.com offers a weekly auction of the dropping .de domains (and also .nl (Netherlands) en .be (Belgium)) that will become available for registration during the next 7 days. Last week the list of .de domains contained no less then 50.000 domains, this week shows a more usual list of around 20.000 domains, giving you plenty of choice.

My experience so far:

I placed a few bids and DomainOrder was able to catch more than half of them, which is satisfying. As the service is ‘no catch, no pay’, I didn’t have to pay anything for the domains that were not registered.
Prices for my domains in the auction remained very reasonable, even low, with only a few exceptions.
Bids are private, which means that hard work to find the gems really pays off. As no one else will see on which domains you placed a bid, you will most likely remain the only bidder. The auction list contains a lot of statistics (a custom score, generic and SEO stats), still you may want to use your own tools as well.
Using online payment, I was able to transfer my domains within minutes after payment.

Some statistics on Germany and .de domains:

Population: 82 million.

Internet users: 72 mln. 

Registered domains: 15.8 million (and still rising). Making it the largest of the regular ccTLD’s.

Dropping domains weekly: around 20.000.

Domain sales are high, second on the Sedo marketplace right after .com. Kaffee.de sold in 2014 for Eur 100.000. 

The DomainOrder auction starts on Monday 9am CET and ends on Tuesday 2pm CET. Give it a shot: www.domainorder.com