Person who bought domain on payment plan cashed in when restaurant chain came calling.
This weekend I wanted to see how long the wait was for a table at Din Tai Fung during lunchtime. Its online waitlist was closed, so I called the location near me.
I was taken aback when the recording told me to visit DTF.com. I didn’t know that the chain, the highest-grossing per-store restaurant chain in the country, owned this three-letter domain.
It turns out it’s a fairly recent development. Previously, the company used DinTaiFung.com and DinTaiFungUSA.com for its website.
That’s kind of hard to spell. I even typed ‘Tai’ as ‘Thai’ when originally writing this story.
The company acquired DTF.com in early 2024 and transitioned its website to the domain later in the year.
I looked up the domain’s history and found that Nat Cohen’s Telepathy owned it until late 2023. But he wasn’t the seller; I also discovered a forum post from someone else stating he sold the domain in February 2024. Lumis reported brokering a transaction that month.
So what gives?
It turns out that Telepathy sold the domain name on a payment plan starting in late 2023. Then Din Tai Fung came along, wanting to buy the domain. The person who was paying off the domain decided to take the offer and paid off the lease-to-own transaction early.
It seems that the forum owner was the big winner here, quickly profiting from selling the domain to the restaurant chain.
The other winners are middle school and high school kids who get to snicker whenever they see the domain name. (Look it up if you need to.)
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/
