Interesting! Do you have any info how terms of these leases look like?

Noah Kagan did a podcast on the deal he made to buy Sumo.com. Not a straight lease but more like a payment plan. He talks about how Mint.com was purchased this way too.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noah-kagan-presents-form...

This sounds like seller financing, it's very common in real estate transactions and other large asset purchases.

We were in a negotiation to purchase photo.com. The asking price was around $1.5M and we had worked out an agreement where we would purchase the domain at a discount (in exchange for revenue share) and make the payments in equal parts over 12 months.

There were target revenue numbers and penalties if we were unable to make the monthly payment of around $80k.

Thank goodness the deal fell through.

My business does this as a part of its offerings. The deals are usually all custom as they are potentially very valuable domains involved.

Most of the time though they have a buyout component after a certain period of time and they sometimes allow part of the lease payments to apply to the final payment price.

It really just depends. More leverage for the terms on do.com vs say "Ilovewebsiteswithorangeheaders.com"

Well technically, we all rent the domains from our registrars.

I avoid however, to rent from a 3rd party who is the domain owner within the registry.