Topic

Ability to put down a deposit on a new home

One thing we desperately need is the ability to put a down-payment on a property you want to move to, then have, say, 15 minutes in which to sell your old place and complete the transaction. I finally went through the pain to assemble trusted friends and dozens of big bags and stuffed everything in them, only to find that the houses that had been available just 5 minutes earlier, which I'd wanted to buy, were suddenly gone.  So.... no house, stuff in too many bags to carry, good thing we can have friends give us keys to their place now so I can pile up my bags somewhere while I wait for a place to become available.I would have been happy to put down even a non-refundable deposit, if it could have held the property for me for a few minutes.

Posted 13 months ago by Eleanor Rigby Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • This seems reasonable.
    Posted 13 months ago by Fluxan Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Just allow you to have 2 houses for a minimum of "Y" minutes real-time, then the older of the two, the one you bought first, automatically goes up for sale and you get the sale money and lose access and any unmoved stuff in the old house.  Roll the currants from the old house into the new house price so Glitchen only have to pay the difference up front.

    How could this be mis-used? If you tried to ensure a friend got your old house by letting them hover over the listing page when you sold, there's no guarantee they would see it and click first. Setting the time the old one appears for resale to a random number of minutes would make it extremely difficult to warp the sale in favor of a friend.

    I don't think this would be difficult to implement - add an extra slot in the database for the possibility of a second house, with a timestamp for the transaction on the second house ... every X minutes run a process that checks to see if any second houses were purchased more than Y minutes ago, and if so, complete the sale on the old one. If the process were run at intervals slightly more than the guaranteed minimum minutes it would be hard to predict when the sold house would appear.

    EXAMPLE: For a 15-minute transition, a process running at an interval that varied between 16 and 21 minutes would add uncertainty.

    Arranging to feed new and resale houses out at intervals instead of as a block would spread the house joy around the clock.
    Posted 13 months ago by Tsu Dho Nimh Subscriber! | Permalink