Some registrars do offer the ability to "pre-order", waiting until a domain has expired and then snapping it up.

I own steve.org.uk, and after moving to Finland I noticed steve.fi was going to expire in the near-future. So I setup a cron-job that would text me the moment it became free.

First of all it went from registered to being in the redemption state, then it became generally available. I managed to register it once I'd woken up - though competition was less than I'd otherwise expect because at the time you needed to have a Finnish identity-number to register Finnish domains. I suspect that is no longer true.