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I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote. We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specifi

I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote. We had been looking for a new build for some time and had settled on a development and specific house we wanted to buy, but it was still months away from being released. We were told they released houses in person first, then listed them online later that day, but I was bored and wanted to see when new houses were listed, so I wrote a scraper to alert me whenever a new house became available. One day, we got a call from the property developer telling us the house we were interested in would be available in person from 10am the next day. Because we wanted to be certain to get it, we appeared at 8am, only to find that 3 other people were already waiting. Houses are released in batches of 2 or 3, so whilst we weren't hopeful, we joined the queue and waited. At 9am, while waiting in line, I got an alert telling me that the house had been released online, so I open their website on my phone and paid the deposit. At 10am, when the sales office opened, all hell broke loose as the person first in line (waiting since 5am...) discovered the house they wanted had already been reserved online. I'd effectively stolen his house. It was awkward to say the least as all of us were crammed into a tiny portacabin while this unfolded. In truth, I felt awful for depriving him of the house he and his family wanted, but relieved that we had reserved the house we wanted after a 5 month wait. A few weeks later the developer got in touch to say that they had changed their policy nationwide and would only be releasing houses online in the future because of "the incident"... Whilst I wasn't willing to give up our reservation, I worked with the person who had wanted our house so that they were alerted whenever a similar house in the same development became available. He got one, there's no hard feelings, and him and his family are now my next door neighbours.

zachwill 5y ago
Very cool! Great story.
jwong_ 5y ago
Did you end up running the scraper longer for your new neighbour?
- JamesMcMinn 5y ago
  I did, yes. I set it up with some specific conditions that sent him an alert whenever a house similar to ours became available. In the end, he got the house directly next to ours and very similar in design. Our garages actually share a wall.
  - jwong_ 5y ago
    That's really kind of you to run that scraper for him as well. Glad it all worked out~
gcheong 5y ago
Great story though I initially thought you meant you wrote a script that paid off your house :).
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Myself as well!
- geek_at 5y ago
  I had a feeling his script somehow made him skip the queue. When I was looking for a new apartment one of my friends told me about his startup that was basically scraping databases of realestate companies and I signed up with them and to my surprise I was alerted for an apartment in the location I wanted and it was up just a few minutes so I was able to contact the agent before they even started their advertisements. I got the apartment but sadly the startup was bought and shut down operations soon aferwards
tomcam 5y ago
Your generosity gave you the best possible outcome in this deal. Impressive.
japhyr 5y ago
I appreciate you bringing this up, because I think this plays out all the time. I live in a small isolated town, and there wasn't a lot of turnover in houses even before the pandemic. I wrote a short script that scrapes all the listings, and alerts me to any new local listing. It was a fun little project to learn about generating text messages, and to see how effective a cron job on a sleeping MacBook can be. We ended up getting a house through a friend who sold their home without listing it, but those alerts were really helpful, and almost got us one house a little earlier. The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. I don't think the parent commenter was wrong to write their script, and I don't think I was wrong to write mine, and if you wrote something similar I think it was a reasonable move as well. But we have to recognize the advantage this gives us, as people who are able to spot these opportunities and act on them. I don't have any answers, but I think this story brings up a good discussion. I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this.
- davnn 5y ago
  > The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. Where I live the good deals from private sellers (mostly older people) pretty much never get posted online, thus you would have to socially integrate somehow offline in the region you would like to buy a house :). It looks like I still have to wait for some cultural development to benefit from your proposed divide.
- philsnow 5y ago
  Especially in smaller markets, there aren't very many agents. You can get a lot out of inviting realtors to coffee from time to time. When somebody is thinking about selling, they often talk to realtors early on, so you can learn about them before they hit the MLS.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Regarding tech literacy, I participated in a project in early 2021 for this reason. COVID vaccination slots were put online and would disappear the second they went up. Vulnerable people, like the elderly, had trouble booking the appointments they needed. What ended up happening is a few developers got together and put together an alert system that scraped for appointment slots and automated alerts about when they were available publicly on social media. Quite a few people were able to get slots they wouldn't have got by just manually trying to get a slot.
tshaddox 5y ago
One of the things that always frustrates me (despite being very much in the "first world problems" category) is when queueing or reservation systems are unclear or chaotic or otherwise unfair, although I generally only encounter this at stores, never for something as significant as a house! The most ubiquitous one is the practice of totally separate parallel queues where you just have to guess which queue will be fastest. Another lovely related one is when you're waiting in your queue for quite some time, then a new queue opens up right next to you and quickly fills up with newcomers who haven't been waiting at all! Come on store owners, just have a single queue with multiple consumers popping off the same queue! Again, I'm not going to pretend this isn't totally a first world problem!
- pedantsamaritan 5y ago
  Another variation I have been on both sides of: stores favoring certain channels over others. For example, a local fast-food restaurant might prioritize answering the phone for carry-out orders over in-person carry out orders.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Is a jealousy issue? Without the second line you were going to take as long as you were. Opening a second line helped people further back catch up and in some cases surpass your speed. Someone else having a quicker experience shouldn't have changed your experience.
  - stockboss 5y ago
    maybe it's more of a fairness issue. in theory, the proper way should be to have a single line that funnels to any available lane, so any newcomer would still have to join the same line and not get any advantage over someone who has been waiting.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    I wouldn’t call it jealousy to want everyone to be served in the order they arrived, since that’s obviously the intention of flat unprioritized queues. You can certainly make arguments that FIFO isn’t the best or right way to process a grocery store checkout queue, but for now I’d rather it be implemented well rather than poorly.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
I did basically exactly this but for reserving a spot at the visa centre for a residence permit appointment. Subverting a small aspect of the Hostile Environment[1] took a little bit of the edge of the general bastardry of the whole process. Still a bloody expensive and emotionally draining experience though: if it has to be done again, I won't be putting a loved one though that again and we'll both be leaving. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environmen...
dybber 5y ago
Did the same for my previous apartment. I wrote a script scraping various “self-sale” sites (sales without real estate agents), the script would notify me when new apartments living up to my criteria was posted online. When I got such a notification I would quickly check photos of the place etc. and then call the seller. The guy selling the place I ended buying, said it felt like I called him up instantly after he posted it online.
- mod 5y ago
  I used to watch the craigslist free section with a script, and I got that response a lot. I was calling within 1 minute of post time sometimes. Being first pretty much gets you anything you want in that section.
recentrecruit 5y ago
Reminds me of "Project Thor" from my university days. Course registrations were online, but in phases, e.g. Seniors for a week, then Juniors for a week, and so down the line. However, many students would snag a spot in a course only to drop it as they shuffled courses around. There existed a "queue" for the overflow, but it appeared to work as a CRON job or otherwise involved a human in the loop as one would routinely see: Spanish 102 (Registered: (29/30), Queued:(60)) While in this state, one could simply click on the course and register, completely bypassing this poorly designed queue. So, naturally, I wrote a script to scrape the site on once a minute (hammering it, and so Project Thor) and alert me once a slot had opened up. Eventually provided this service to my friends as well.
- therein 5y ago
  I did something similar at UIUC very many years ago. I was called to the office of head of Department of Computer Science and kindly told while he thinks it is cool that I am applying my skills relevant to my field of study, I should stop what I am doing as even simply scraping could be construed malicious if it got the attention of the wrong people in the school.
- jotm 5y ago
  I've got something similar for appointments at citizens' bureaus in some European cities. The waiting time is usually around a month, which is insane imo. My script constantly looks for open/canceled spots and reserves them (some need email/phone confirmation, which makes it a bit harder). Pretty standard stuff. That's how I got my appointment in 3 days instead of a month. So, I'm thinking of making money from this, but I'm not sure about the legality of it all.
  - FPGAhacker 5y ago
    What is a citizens’ bureau?
    - konha 5y ago
      Not OP, but sounds like the places in Germany where you go to get or extend your passport, register after moving to a new place etc. Notoriously hard to get a timely appointment for things that should not require an in person interaction in the first place.
conroydave 5y ago
id love to get their honest opinion on the 'no hard feelings' part
zhoujianfu 5y ago
I also own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote! I wrote it in 2012 to automatically buy bitcoin once a week.
nunez 5y ago
lol don't feel bad; you took advantage of a broken system and automated your way through it. The first person in line would've done the same if they knew how!
omneity 5y ago
A similar story happened to me in the past with appointment slots at an embassy, and - shameless plug, I built a tool[0] to monitor websites on my behalf, and send custom alerts to Telegram, Discord, Slack, or archive data in Airtable, Sheets etc. No coding or devops is required, you can get it done in 2 min [1]. We're in Beta so stability is still a goal we're pursuing, but for many happy paths Monitoro is a huge timesaver. [0]: https://monitoro.co https://monitoro.co [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkJDk1lzrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkJDk1lzrY
- stuckkeys 5y ago
  This is pretty cool.
  - omneity 5y ago
    Thank you! :)
mahathu 5y ago
>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote. Somewhat similar story for me. I live in a big European city where young people/students predominantly live in flatshares. One website which pretty much has a monopoly on room ads here also allows room seekers to post an inquiry themselves. So many people do it that after less than half an hour, your ad will already be somewhere at the end of page 2. I wrote a script to automatically update my ad every few minutes to push it back to the top. I ended up getting a lot of responses I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
nanidin 5y ago
I have similar stories for launch day Nvidia cards, concert tickets, festival tickets, and original artwork from creators on Etsy. Any time I catch myself wasting time refreshing a page for availability, I try to replace myself with a script.
artdigital 5y ago
I did the same with the apartment I currently live in. Although it's a rental, places here are taken within minutes of being posted online, and my bot gave me the edge to put in a reservation before anyone else was
- jamil7 5y ago
  Let me guess, Berlin?
petters 5y ago
I think there are a large percentage of programmers at Swedish national soccer games, as they release tickets online at a first come, first served basis. (At least 10 years ago) This is also true for fancy restaurant bookings.
Fritsdehacker 5y ago
I had a similar experience, though not with a house. My sons school was organizing a couple of sport activities. We could sign him up for the different activities, but it was first come first serve. We were early, so our son ended up doing all the activities. This meant some kids ended up getting nothing. I found this very unfair. Better would have been to let all the kids list there preferences and then fairly distribute the kids over the activities. However, I could see why the school wouldn't want to bother with this. I ended up creating a tool (1) for them to do this easily. It's quite ugly, but it's open source (2) and it works. The tool is in dutch because it's a dutch school. (1) https://eerlijke-indeling.nl/ https://eerlijke-indeling.nl/ (2) https://github.com/deliriouspenguin/eerlijke-indeling https://github.com/deliriouspenguin/eerlijke-indeling

zachwill 5y ago

Very cool! Great story.

jwong_ 5y ago

Did you end up running the scraper longer for your new neighbour?

JamesMcMinn 5y ago
I did, yes. I set it up with some specific conditions that sent him an alert whenever a house similar to ours became available. In the end, he got the house directly next to ours and very similar in design. Our garages actually share a wall.
- jwong_ 5y ago
  That's really kind of you to run that scraper for him as well. Glad it all worked out~

gcheong 5y ago

Great story though I initially thought you meant you wrote a script that paid off your house :).

hungryforcodes 5y ago
Myself as well!
geek_at 5y ago
I had a feeling his script somehow made him skip the queue. When I was looking for a new apartment one of my friends told me about his startup that was basically scraping databases of realestate companies and I signed up with them and to my surprise I was alerted for an apartment in the location I wanted and it was up just a few minutes so I was able to contact the agent before they even started their advertisements. I got the apartment but sadly the startup was bought and shut down operations soon aferwards

tomcam 5y ago

Your generosity gave you the best possible outcome in this deal. Impressive.

japhyr 5y ago

I appreciate you bringing this up, because I think this plays out all the time. I live in a small isolated town, and there wasn't a lot of turnover in houses even before the pandemic. I wrote a short script that scrapes all the listings, and alerts me to any new local listing. It was a fun little project to learn about generating text messages, and to see how effective a cron job on a sleeping MacBook can be. We ended up getting a house through a friend who sold their home without listing it, but those alerts were really helpful, and almost got us one house a little earlier. The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. I don't think the parent commenter was wrong to write their script, and I don't think I was wrong to write mine, and if you wrote something similar I think it was a reasonable move as well. But we have to recognize the advantage this gives us, as people who are able to spot these opportunities and act on them. I don't have any answers, but I think this story brings up a good discussion. I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on this.

davnn 5y ago
> The bigger story here is what this means for the divide between tech-literate people and the rest of the population. Where I live the good deals from private sellers (mostly older people) pretty much never get posted online, thus you would have to socially integrate somehow offline in the region you would like to buy a house :). It looks like I still have to wait for some cultural development to benefit from your proposed divide.
philsnow 5y ago
Especially in smaller markets, there aren't very many agents. You can get a lot out of inviting realtors to coffee from time to time. When somebody is thinking about selling, they often talk to realtors early on, so you can learn about them before they hit the MLS.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Regarding tech literacy, I participated in a project in early 2021 for this reason. COVID vaccination slots were put online and would disappear the second they went up. Vulnerable people, like the elderly, had trouble booking the appointments they needed. What ended up happening is a few developers got together and put together an alert system that scraped for appointment slots and automated alerts about when they were available publicly on social media. Quite a few people were able to get slots they wouldn't have got by just manually trying to get a slot.

tshaddox 5y ago

One of the things that always frustrates me (despite being very much in the "first world problems" category) is when queueing or reservation systems are unclear or chaotic or otherwise unfair, although I generally only encounter this at stores, never for something as significant as a house! The most ubiquitous one is the practice of totally separate parallel queues where you just have to guess which queue will be fastest. Another lovely related one is when you're waiting in your queue for quite some time, then a new queue opens up right next to you and quickly fills up with newcomers who haven't been waiting at all! Come on store owners, just have a single queue with multiple consumers popping off the same queue! Again, I'm not going to pretend this isn't totally a first world problem!

pedantsamaritan 5y ago
Another variation I have been on both sides of: stores favoring certain channels over others. For example, a local fast-food restaurant might prioritize answering the phone for carry-out orders over in-person carry out orders.
ipaddr 5y ago
Is a jealousy issue? Without the second line you were going to take as long as you were. Opening a second line helped people further back catch up and in some cases surpass your speed. Someone else having a quicker experience shouldn't have changed your experience.
- stockboss 5y ago
  maybe it's more of a fairness issue. in theory, the proper way should be to have a single line that funnels to any available lane, so any newcomer would still have to join the same line and not get any advantage over someone who has been waiting.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call it jealousy to want everyone to be served in the order they arrived, since that’s obviously the intention of flat unprioritized queues. You can certainly make arguments that FIFO isn’t the best or right way to process a grocery store checkout queue, but for now I’d rather it be implemented well rather than poorly.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

I did basically exactly this but for reserving a spot at the visa centre for a residence permit appointment. Subverting a small aspect of the Hostile Environment[1] took a little bit of the edge of the general bastardry of the whole process. Still a bloody expensive and emotionally draining experience though: if it has to be done again, I won't be putting a loved one though that again and we'll both be leaving. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environmen...

dybber 5y ago

Did the same for my previous apartment. I wrote a script scraping various “self-sale” sites (sales without real estate agents), the script would notify me when new apartments living up to my criteria was posted online. When I got such a notification I would quickly check photos of the place etc. and then call the seller. The guy selling the place I ended buying, said it felt like I called him up instantly after he posted it online.

mod 5y ago
I used to watch the craigslist free section with a script, and I got that response a lot. I was calling within 1 minute of post time sometimes. Being first pretty much gets you anything you want in that section.

recentrecruit 5y ago

Reminds me of "Project Thor" from my university days. Course registrations were online, but in phases, e.g. Seniors for a week, then Juniors for a week, and so down the line. However, many students would snag a spot in a course only to drop it as they shuffled courses around. There existed a "queue" for the overflow, but it appeared to work as a CRON job or otherwise involved a human in the loop as one would routinely see: Spanish 102 (Registered: (29/30), Queued:(60)) While in this state, one could simply click on the course and register, completely bypassing this poorly designed queue. So, naturally, I wrote a script to scrape the site on once a minute (hammering it, and so Project Thor) and alert me once a slot had opened up. Eventually provided this service to my friends as well.

therein 5y ago
I did something similar at UIUC very many years ago. I was called to the office of head of Department of Computer Science and kindly told while he thinks it is cool that I am applying my skills relevant to my field of study, I should stop what I am doing as even simply scraping could be construed malicious if it got the attention of the wrong people in the school.
jotm 5y ago
I've got something similar for appointments at citizens' bureaus in some European cities. The waiting time is usually around a month, which is insane imo. My script constantly looks for open/canceled spots and reserves them (some need email/phone confirmation, which makes it a bit harder). Pretty standard stuff. That's how I got my appointment in 3 days instead of a month. So, I'm thinking of making money from this, but I'm not sure about the legality of it all.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  What is a citizens’ bureau?
  - konha 5y ago
    Not OP, but sounds like the places in Germany where you go to get or extend your passport, register after moving to a new place etc. Notoriously hard to get a timely appointment for things that should not require an in person interaction in the first place.

conroydave 5y ago

id love to get their honest opinion on the 'no hard feelings' part

zhoujianfu 5y ago

I also own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote! I wrote it in 2012 to automatically buy bitcoin once a week.

nunez 5y ago

lol don't feel bad; you took advantage of a broken system and automated your way through it. The first person in line would've done the same if they knew how!

omneity 5y ago

A similar story happened to me in the past with appointment slots at an embassy, and - shameless plug, I built a tool[0] to monitor websites on my behalf, and send custom alerts to Telegram, Discord, Slack, or archive data in Airtable, Sheets etc. No coding or devops is required, you can get it done in 2 min [1]. We're in Beta so stability is still a goal we're pursuing, but for many happy paths Monitoro is a huge timesaver. [0]: https://monitoro.co https://monitoro.co [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkJDk1lzrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkJDk1lzrY

stuckkeys 5y ago
This is pretty cool.
- omneity 5y ago
  Thank you! :)

mahathu 5y ago

>I own the house I currently live in because of a script I wrote. Somewhat similar story for me. I live in a big European city where young people/students predominantly live in flatshares. One website which pretty much has a monopoly on room ads here also allows room seekers to post an inquiry themselves. So many people do it that after less than half an hour, your ad will already be somewhere at the end of page 2. I wrote a script to automatically update my ad every few minutes to push it back to the top. I ended up getting a lot of responses I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

nanidin 5y ago

I have similar stories for launch day Nvidia cards, concert tickets, festival tickets, and original artwork from creators on Etsy. Any time I catch myself wasting time refreshing a page for availability, I try to replace myself with a script.

artdigital 5y ago

I did the same with the apartment I currently live in. Although it's a rental, places here are taken within minutes of being posted online, and my bot gave me the edge to put in a reservation before anyone else was

jamil7 5y ago
Let me guess, Berlin?

petters 5y ago

I think there are a large percentage of programmers at Swedish national soccer games, as they release tickets online at a first come, first served basis. (At least 10 years ago) This is also true for fancy restaurant bookings.

Fritsdehacker 5y ago

I had a similar experience, though not with a house. My sons school was organizing a couple of sport activities. We could sign him up for the different activities, but it was first come first serve. We were early, so our son ended up doing all the activities. This meant some kids ended up getting nothing. I found this very unfair. Better would have been to let all the kids list there preferences and then fairly distribute the kids over the activities. However, I could see why the school wouldn't want to bother with this. I ended up creating a tool (1) for them to do this easily. It's quite ugly, but it's open source (2) and it works. The tool is in dutch because it's a dutch school. (1) https://eerlijke-indeling.nl/ https://eerlijke-indeling.nl/ (2) https://github.com/deliriouspenguin/eerlijke-indeling https://github.com/deliriouspenguin/eerlijke-indeling