Automated Lease To Own (LTO) deals at scale are a nice innovation for selling domain names. I like the passive income produced by my LTO sales, and if a buyer defaults on a deal, I get the domain name returned to me. Dan.com introduced automated LTO deals at a scale, and Afternic began offering LTO deals to buyers in the second half of 2023.

At the end of November, I closed my first LTO deal via Afternic. The domain name is being acquired for $4,999 on a 12 month payment plan. The buyer paid on November 27th, and the first payout was sent to me on November 29th. Because Afternic utilizes the Dan.com payment schedule, the second payment was scheduled to be made to me on January 7th. I assume the buyer was obligated to pay on the one month anniversary – December 27th.

Last week, I announced that I sold my first domain name via Afternic’s Lease to Own option. The domain name was sold for $4,999, which will hopefully be paid over 12 months. Notably, I turned off LTO for domain names priced below $2,000, so when I received the email I knew it wasn’t going to be a table minimum LTO.

Just landed my first LTO sale at @Afternic. It’s a 12 month, $4,999 deal.

Other than removing the domain name from Dan and Sedo, they’re handling everything else.

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) November 27, 2023

Yesterday afternoon, I checked to see if anything had been done with the domain name I sold. To my surprise, the buyer already launched a website on the domain name. It’s not a simple WordPress theme or a template that was uploaded and potentially forgotten about. I think this bodes well for the completion of this payment plan.

Afternic has added two columns to its dashboard that will be of interest to domain investors who use the platform to sell domain names. Users can now see the number of visits to the domain name in the trailing 30 days and the number of leads the domain name generated in that time period.

To access (or remove) this new data provided by Afternic, users can select and add columns for Views and Leads on their dashboard. A generic screenshot of this shared by GoDaddy is posted above.