Afternic will leverage Dan.com’s existing LTO system but will tap into GoDaddy and its brokers for greater distribution.
Lease-to-own (LTO) options for Aftermarket domains are finally coming to Afternic and GoDaddy.
The company has said the feature was on its roadmap, but some of the details of the rollout show that it’s a bit more complicated for the company to implement than just flipping a switch.
First, some of the big details:
- Sellers can opt-in for any domain priced between $495 to $100,000.
- Sellers can set a term of up to 60 months.
- Buyers will pay added service fees for terms greater than 12 months, and GoDaddy will share some of these fees with sellers through reduced commissions (similar to how Dan.com splits fees). For deals greater than 36 months, the effective commission from your asking price will be 0% assuming you use a GoDaddy/Dan nameserver.
- The minimum monthly payment is $100, so if a domain is priced such that monthly payments would be lower, Afternic will automatically decrease the term option available to the buyer.
- Afternic brokers can offer LTO (on opted-in domains) to help close a deal. This is the case even if you don’t use the LTO lander.
In order to launch LTO as quickly as possible, GoDaddy is leveraging Dan.com’s existing LTO system. This means a couple of things:
- If you want your LTO option to show on your sales lander, you need to select the Dan.com lander option. It looks just like existing Dan.com landers.
- If someone buys a domain on LTO through the GoDaddy search path, they will be sent to Dan.com to complete the purchase rather than through the GoDaddy checkout.
Some good news around that last bullet point…yes, LTO will show as an option when someone searches for a domain at GoDaddy. For now, it won’t show as an option for other Afternic partner registrars.
The rollout of LTO will occur in phases. Starting today, sellers can opt into LTO and choose maximum payment durations through the Afternic dashboard. This can be done domain by domain or in bulk. You can also set it as a default for domains you add to Afternic in the future. Sellers with more than 10,000 domains can contact support for assistance.
A few weeks later, Afternic will start to roll it out to buyers.
Why restrict to $100,000?
There are many buyers who would like to use LTO for the deal amounting over 100K so I suggest not to put any limit on the maximum amount.
That’s a good point. I know the Afternic caps Buy Now network sales at $100k, but not sure why it would apply to LTOs. Kellie Peterson just sold one at Dan today for $168k – https://twitter.com/DomainNameWire/status/1679573290229157889
Yeah, exactly!
As per Paul Nicks comment, my understanding is that the 100K cap will be lifted in the future.
Great news.
DAN has a great LTO and other features and why the features are not incorporated to Afternic? So what the point of buying Dan? and Uni?
Btw, I just found a bug. I turned on LTO option and selected Dan.com lander for our portfolio. It started opening Dan.com landers now but it does NOT show the pricing we have on domains in the AFTERNIC.com listings. it is showing OLD PRICING from Dan.com account for all domains.
This issue needs to be fixed so the AFTERNIC PRICING is shown on the LTO landers.
Already using these Nameservers:
NS5.AFTERNIC.COM
NS6.AFTERNIC.COM
Does anyone else see this issue?
Could you email me details on this, including example domains? jiles (at) godaddy.com
@Domainking always have the minimum domain lease of $500 each month, but $100 a month is impossible with VAT and annual income tax in Spain (EU) the profitability is low.
In the end it will be selling domains in the trinket market all at $100 or better $99 more commercial per month.
@Abdulbsit is right because a maximum of $100K is necessary to know how to innovate and make sellers happy, not everything here is very complicated @JamesIles had to help me with the transfer of my Uni domain portfolio to the new Godaddy account in the end everything the UNI in Afternic I had to change to Dan.com, because the change had disabled the fast transfer of Afternic.
Go with the new technologies at Godaddy!
Better late than never
This is a great opportunity for trademark owners to pick up domains they couldn’t get before. Have a straw party make an LTO deal on a dictionary word domain that was non-infringing, repurpose it for an infringing use, bring a cybersquatting claim against it, and hang the domain registrant out to dry.
That’s just one of several scenarios this sort of arrangement enables.
@JB
Thank you for introducing this factor. There are many shady practices we encounter in the domain aftermarket.
It wouldn’t be shocking if a motivated TM holder attempted such trickery.
GoDaddy needs to hire JB to consult on this issue to avoid future liability, entanglements, or risking premium domains in the LTO arrangement.
They can certainly get by without my help. I would be interested to see the terms, now that customers are able to opt into this offering, so I assume someone has a link. But you can rest assured that the terms are indeed carefully crafted to protect GoDaddy from liability to the fullest extent possible.