A few years back, I glanced at my phone and saw more than ten consecutive emails from Dan.com. For a moment I was baffled by this, but I quickly realized the domain name buyer who had been on a lease to own plan (LTO) decided to pay the balance early, triggering a flood of confirmation emails. This happened several times, and it was always exciting.
Harvey posted a question about early payoffs for LTO deals managed by Afternic:
I have a LTO on a 36 month plan with @afternic. The buyer had a website up and now it directs to a Parking Crew PPC page with a link saying " Buy This Domain". My question is: Can they pay the LTO off in one shot if they are able to flip the domain and pay the LTO off early?
— HarveyKaplan (@HarveyKaplan) September 16, 2025
I replied to Harvey to let him know that Afternic also allows early payoffs on LTO deals. When a buyer opts to pay in full, Afternic/GoDaddy pays the seller in advance as well.
The last time this happened to me was a small 6 month deal I had in early May. For whatever reason, the buyer decided to pay for the domain name in full about six days after starting the payment plan. Like the Dan.com deals that were paid off early, Afternic’s TA team also emailed me for each individual payment that was made.
Most recent one for me was in May. pic.twitter.com/BMjMFSb5aF
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) September 16, 2025
I’ve never bought a domain name using an LTO plan, so I don’t know if/how Dan or Afternic encourages buyers to pay-off the LTO in advance. I am pretty sure I had more early LTO payoffs at Dan than Afternic, but that’s going by memory and I wouldn’t speculate about whether it was coincidental or if it seemed that Dan.com encouraged this more than GoDaddy/Afternic does now.
Either way, it’s nice to get a lump sum of cash for a domain name deal I expected to be receiving payments for on a longer term basis.
is it even legal to relist the LTO bought domain for sale without even owning it fully. Most of us do that.
Afternic does not allow LTO domains to listed on their platform.
I am not sure if godaddy will cancel LTO transaction for the domain if they find it to be listed on other platforms by the buyer while lto payments going on.
Puneet,
GoDaddy does not cancel LTO transactions if you list the domain name on other marketplace platforms. GoDaddy wants to get paid, not take steps that guarantee that it will not get paid. The seller cannot do much about it either given that he or she is under contract to sell the domain name per the LTO agreement. He or she is locked in while they are getting paid monthly.
Separately, there is no law that says that if you use seller financing to buy an asset from a seller that you as the buyer cannot actively market and sell the asset to a third party and then pay off the financing immediately to complete your sales transaction with the third party. An agreed-upon contact might have terms against it but the law does not.
The LTO is like paying for a call option – you pay the option premium monthly for the option to buy the asset at the agreed upon strike price while you go about trying to find a buyer who will buy the asset from you at a higher price. Once you find a buyer and have an agreement with them, you execute the option to buy the asset at the strike price from the seller and then, as the new owner of the asset, you sell the asset to your buyer at the higher price.
Cha. Ching.