You'd be surprised at how enticing the promise of work free income sounds to people with a little extra cash laying around. Most people take the monthly income at face value and irrationally assume several things: 1) The seller isn't lying 2) The site will continue to generate this income indefinitely (What's $5k for a site getting $1,000 a month but for the rest of your life?) 3) That the site is really plug and play like the seller claims and will require no work. A fool and his money..
As far as my knowledge takes me I believe Flipping Enterprises is the top seller on Flippa with over $1M in sales. He certainly has talent and another thing which I know is that he charges some chunky brokerage rates. However you are in the good hands if you go to their company to sell your website.
Ive sold a site on Flippa before in the past (a simple PR 2 website ranking for "free iPhones" and averaging 1000 views each day) and it sold for just under $9k. It made around $700 a month.
Two months after purchasing the site got hit by an update and that was the end. Seems that Flippa buyers just buy websites for the sake of it.
i sold a site there almost 2 years ago for mid X,XXX. They never did anything but migrate it, and I've been making XX-XXX per month off it due to long tails (they've continued to renew the domain as well).
I'm sure a great percentage of the people there lie on the traffic somehow. People claim thousands of hits a day through organic search, but when I run those bitches through ahrefs.com I want to cry.