Lease-to-own statistics from a large domain portfolio

NameBio shared statistics from its 290 LTO transactions at Afternic.

After a record-breaking start to the year, my domain sales in the first half of May fell off a cliff. This is not unusual; with a portfolio my size, it’s common to get just a few sales a month.

Still, I had no sales until the middle of the month, when I closed a five-figure transaction on Sedo. It looked like I was going to end the month with just that one sale, but then I had two lease-to-own sales within two hours of each other on Friday, totaling $16k.

Of course, that total assumes the buyers make all 12 payments.

Lease-to-own is becoming a bigger part of many domain investors’ strategies. But LTOs are not the same as pure sales, as the buyer can walk away at any time.

This weekend, NameBio posted about the current results of its 290 LTO deals at Afternic.

While 26.9% of its LTO sales have been canceled, that understates the cancellation rate because it counts active LTOs as non-canceled. If you look only at LTOs that reached completion, 59% were completed, and 41% were canceled.

The more payments a buyer makes, the less likely they are to cancel. A whopping 36% of NameBio’s LTO cancellations were made after just one payment. Eighty-one percent of cancellers made no more than six payments.

NameBio said that once a deal reaches the second payment, its success rate rises to 70%.

The company also said that most of its LTOs are in the 12-23-month range, so it doesn’t have much data on duration vs. cancellation for LTOs. But it definitely saw a higher cancellation rate for domains as the LTO duration increased. This mirrors what Atom has disclosed in the past.

NameBio also noted that the cancellation rate seemed to have little to do with the monthly payment amount until you got to the high end — buyers who plunked down at least $500 a month were less likely to cancel.

See more stats about LTOs in NameBio’s post.