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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 ev
by 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 agoEspecially 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 agoRegarding 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.
- basisword 5y ago>> Quite a few people were able to get slots they wouldn't have got by just manually trying to get a slot. And the people who played fair didn't get those slots. Obviously there's nothing illegal about this (or the articles similar solution) but it rubs me the wrong way morally. Similar to people getting appointments because they knew someone working in a vaccine centre. If there is a clear order and booking system (e.g. oldest + most vulnerable to youngest/national booking system) and you skip the line or 'hack' the system to give yourself a better chance at getting a slot I'd find it hard not to think you're a dick. NB: this depends a lot on how things work in your specific country so I'm not judging your specific situation but just generally, 'hacking' systems to give yourself an unfair chance at getting something in high demand feels wrong to me.
- bschwindHN 5y agoI think the answer here is to have a system that can't be "gamed" by more tech-literate people. Have a time period where people can throw in their names for consideration, and a randomly-ordered list is generated. You go down the list until you reach a person who can put down the deposit. A lottery, essentially. You could probably poke holes in that system I just described, but it seems more fair than one that is prone to someone writing up a script to scoop it up. I don't want to live in a world of script wars where every desirable entity is quickly snatched by one of several competing computer programs.
- fsckboy 5y ago> I think the answer here is to have a system that can't be "gamed" by more tech-literate people The person selling the house wants to see offers as soon as possible and can accept one at any time--the sooner the better--or hold out for a better one if they're not satisfied. Any system that changes that dynamic to the seller's detriment is not "more fair" to the seller. we expect that an auto mechanic gets a good deal getting his own car fixed, that real estate brokers have an edge getting their own properties, doctors with medical care, etc. You spent years becoming tech savvy to save you a little time scanning real estate ads... I'm not sure what problem you're trying to fix?
- yojo 5y agoI’m hard pressed to think of any first-come, first-served system for allocating scarce goods that wouldn’t be better run as a lottery. The problem is that typically the person selling the item doesn’t care who gets it, so there’s literally zero incentive to spend any effort making a fairer distribution system.
- asdff 5y agoWhat are you using to scrape listing data? afaik mls doesn't expose an api.