Are Namespaces an investment

Having looked through the list of namespaces, and bought one myself, I see a lot of brand and company names being take, do you thing people have bought these with the intention of selling them on later, do you think this is a good/fair idea?

Most of the top level domains / highly visible domains are owned by the devs and will be released to the companies if they should decide to setup a presence on the NEM Platform.

Other than that there is no way to prevent somebody from ‘namespace squatting’.

is it possible to sell a name space, and also if someone wanted to buy one is there a way for them to contact the owner of a namespace?

Yes should be transferable - please see here.

That covers creating the namespace and mosaics, you can send mosaic but can you transfer ownership of an actual namespace?

There is no function to change the owner directly.
Convert address with namespace to multi-sig address.
I think that it is possible if you transfer the management authority of that multi-sig address.

thanks