To sell, or to lease out your IPv4 assets?
The most common discussion on IPv4 market today is about the best time to sell IPv4 subnets.
During 2021 year, from January till October, prices for 1 IPv4 address increased from 18 EUR address up to maximal sales price 53 EUR per each IPv4 address.
Most IPv4 seekers couldn’t pay so high prices, so it became a normal practice, when a buyer has a budget which is a twice less than the sales price. As a result, on the one hand, these buyers buy twice less IPv4 addresses than their needs. On the other hand, the increase of IPv4 lease services took place: buyers who are not able to pay such prices for IPv4 addresses or to deploy IPv6 into their infrastructure immediately, decided to find subnets for a long-term lease.
Starting from December, 2021, according to the open data on the IPv4 marketplaces, we see a low pricing decrease:
We’ve analyzed pricing on three open IPv4 sales platforms and our IPv4 brokerage transactions, and now publishing the minimal and maximal sales prices per month:
December, 2021.
The minimal sales* price is 38 EUR/IP, the maximal sales price is 51 EUR
January, 2022
As on 10.1.2022, , the minimal sales price is 36 EUR/IP (41USD), and the maximal sales price is 47 EUR/IPv4 (54 USD)
*Sales price is the final price the buyer paid, including all brokerage services fees.
What’s next?
We are expecting the IPv4 pricing won’t show us a high increase in the nearest future, but continue to go down slowly and stops around 36-44 EUR/IP .
Meanwhile, IPv6 implementation continues and we are considering the high pricing decrease as soon, as the maim IT players start to sell their IPv4 subnets.
So, what’s about further pricing increase?
We are only expecting the pricing increase on RIPE /24 subnets, since, starting from December 2021, it’s impossible to get a /24 subnet directly from RIPE without being in a long waiting list for several months.
Also, we can’t predict how long the ipv6 implementation takes, but we still have several years of quite high prices on IPv4 subnets.
If there’s no high pricing decrease in the nearest future, maybe it’s better to lease out subnets now and wait for a couple of years with the sale?
It’s a question of your priorities.
- Reputation and IPv4 cleanness
We do not recommend to lease out large subnets: no one can guarantee that the subnet remains clean during the usage.
Not all abuses go to abuse mails. There’re millions of online websites and each website can block ipv4 address to protect their website if someone violates their terms of use. Of course, you can delete your subnet from Spamhaus SBL, PBL, Yahoo , Hotmail or other well-known listings, but you will never detect all the websites which blocked your ip addresses during the lease by other company. Just because they don’t send abuse mails.
As an example, a good well-known hosting company leases your subnet. They have a 24 hours abuse support and react on abuse mail and block users really fast. But, they cannot react, if they don’t receive an abuse. As example, there’re several users on one popular french game. This game blocks ips of users who violated the game rules and to find this problem you shall get another user on the same ip address who detects this problem.
Therefore, if you have IPv4 subnets which are not in use, you would like to sell them at the market price and your company reputation is important for you we do not recommend to lease out IPv4 addresses, but sell.
2. Monetization
If you don’t need your IPv4 assets now, but would like to monetise them now and to use them in future, then you can try to lease it out. We recommend you to divide big blocks into smaller ones . If one of end users does something really bad, the subnet could be blacklisted in a whole and it’s easier to clean it when it’s a small subnet.
Conclusion
Sell, don’t lease!
We think now it’s the best time to sell your IPv4 assets, while the prices are still high.
We do not recommend to lease out subnets if you plan to sell it in future to protect your IPv4 addresses from the blacklisting.
