After managing thousands of domains over the years, you get used to buying, selling, dropping, and occasionally forgetting about names I once registered. But today, something interesting happened, I ended up winning an auction for a domain I originally hand-registered back in 2007.

The domain AssetsFunding.com is officially back in my portfolio after more than a decade.

As usual, after winning the name at GoDaddy’s expired auction, I went to add it to my Afternic portfolio. That’s part of my normal workflow whenever I pick up new domains.

But Afternic gave me a strange message:

“This domain already exists in your portfolio.”

At first, I thought it was a glitch. Then I checked the old records. Sure enough, I had hand-registered AssetsFunding.com in 2007. I completely forgot about it. I ended up letting it expire in 2012, and after that, the domain took a little journey of its own. It bounced through a few owners and eventually landed with BuyDomains in 2016. Somehow, even they let it go, and that’s when it slipped into the expired auctions again.

That’s where our paths crossed, again. Winning It Back in 2025. When I saw AssetsFunding.com in the GoDaddy expired auctions, I chased it because I immediately saw the fit for: MortgageBrands.com, my mortgage domain name marketplace, and MortgageSites.com, my web development platform for the mortgage industry. It’s a strong, finance-driven name. Asset depletion or asset utilization is a popular mortgage program in the non-QM mortgage market. Exactly the type of domain I like building into my mortgage ecosystem. I had no idea I once owned it. I was simply bidding because it matched my current business strategy. I ended up as the leading bidder at $169, and only after adding it to Afternic did I learn that I had personally registered this same name 18 years ago.

I’ve won a lot of domains over the years, but reacquiring one I first hand-registered nearly two decades ago is a new experience, even for me. It’s funny how these things come back around. AssetsFunding.com is back where it started, and this time it’s going to work its way into one of my active platforms instead of sitting around doing nothing.

Feels good to bring it home.