Why isn't housing a normal auction process?

[Kosmos992k]

When a house becomes available, start an auction period on it (1 week perhaps) where anyone can go up to the placard and place a bid. At the end of the auction the highest bid wins the plot and everyone else gets their money back. No incentive for buying low just to resell, a more powerful gil sink, and no having to pray that you get lucky and catch a vacant lot some day before it gets scooped up. I'm a little surprised that it doesn't work this way already.

Add to this a restriction on property ownership to one *personal* estate per account, per server, shared between any/all Alternat characters on the same account & server and you have a winner. Housing speculators who can't buy multiple lots and can't 'sell' property, or rather sell their relinquishing of a property, will quickly give up and look for something else to exploit for personal gain.

[Colorful]

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/10char

My bad, I should have read it over. .-. Well glad to see you agree then, I don't see how the OP finds any benefit to this system. If you're already rolling in gil you might as well buy the house from another player.

[Stormrider]

Housing market is polar opposite.

Material merchandise auctions (non estate) start low and progressively go up until someone wins by time or reaches the buyout price.

Housing markets do the opposite. Sellers start high and gradually lower their price to find acceptable buyers.

EDIT: I'm not saying bidding wars never happen, is just incredibly rare that housing does turn into an auction IRL.

I am going to guess you are american and have never been in a community where housing shortage and an abundance of fools and money. In Canada in the province of Alberta this has happened in the last decade. Most houses sold for hundred of thousands of dollars more then listing. Realtors would not even sell houses until they got 4 or 5 competing bids. Some properties literally doubled in price from bidding. You still after the bid have mortgage insurance approve the property value. But at the time they were approving everything sky was the limit.

[WeekendSoja]

Good idea. People are worried about people with big wallets where I worry about the people buying houses off party finder for the price of lease just to have the person relinquish and said person also needs to pay for the lease now. effectively doubling the cost for that person, maybe even tripling because who sells at no profit in this scenario?

I don't like the 1 lot per account idea because it's fun playing Monopoly (I just have a small house so I don't play that housing game). Maybe also incorporate a system that allows you to sell the lease and plot in one go so the poor soul doesn't have to pay triple the price?

[seraphuslol]

I am going to guess you are american and have never been in a community where housing shortage and an abundance of fools and money. In Canada in the province of Alberta this has happened in the last decade. Most houses sold for hundred of thousands of dollars more then listing. Realtors would not even sell houses until they got 4 or 5 competing bids. Some properties literally doubled in price from bidding. You still after the bid have mortgage insurance approve the property value. But at the time they were approving everything sky was the limit.

Holy cap that's awful

[Gamer3427]

While I disagree with the auction suggestion, snipe bidding only works when people are attempting to be cheap.

If you bid the maximum amount you're willing to pay you'll never lose because a bid was "sniped". And by "lose" I mean this: if the maximum you're willing to pay is 1000 gil, and someone bids 1001 gil at the last second, then you didn't lose because of *how* they bid, but rather because they were simply willing to pay more than you were. Whether they bid 1001 gil a second before the auction ended or weeks before it ended would be irrelevant if you're not willing to go over 1000 gil - you lost because they were willing to pay more, not because of timing. And if you were willing to pay 1002, that's what you should have bid to start off with (particularly if the auctions uses a smart bid system (like ebay)).

The purpose of an auction isn't to bid your maximum amount at first. That would simply be stupid because you could very well end up overpaying. When you bid at an auction, you bid the minimum amount required to beat the other bidders, then you offer more money if someone else outbids you. In the end, it is whoever is willing to pay the most over all, but the goal isn't to hit that cap immediately because other potential buyer's caps may be far lower and you're wasting your money if you pay your maximum immediately. This is why snipe bidding works, because the "sniper" is willing to pay a large amount of money to get the product, but they're smart enough to realize that they don't HAVE to if they wait and bid just slightly higher than the previous bidder at the last second. You say it only works when "people are attempting to be cheap", but that is indeed the primary point of an auction. Otherwise you'd have people paying a ludicrous amount of money for these things right off the bat, (for example in this case 500mil gil), because they didn't care about saving money. Auctions are designed to be so that whoever is willing to pay the most for an item, pays the least they could conceivably have to pay for it.....

As for the topic in question, I don't support this at all. The housing market is already controlled by a relatively small group of people who sit and watch for plots to open and buy them immediately. Sometimes though, other people can get them because they're a little bit faster. With an auction system though, the people with massive quantities of gil, (let's be honest, most of which are gil sellers), wouldn't have to watch for when plots of land open up. They'd just have to see when the last days of an auction are, and focus on outbidding people then. There would be no chance at all for houses to slip past them UNLESS someone Sniped them, which is highly unlikely to occur.....

[WeekendSoja]

The game could adopt a bidding system like most online auctions tend to use now-a-days..where the current bid may not even be the highest bid.

A ton of auctions which are not held in real time use this "maximum bid" function which will allow a person to show a current bid of x amount of Gil but will actually have y amount in the background and the system will auto bid for them if someone tries to snipe. It sounds like a terrible system but it works mainly because people will only realistically put down what they think the item is worth.

Now in regards to that last statement, to someone with large pockets a mansion would be worth, as an example, 200mil, but someone who desperately wanted to get a house for his friends and just never got the opportunity to be on when things opened put down 300 mil. Ridiculous? Maybe. To that guy who paid 100mil more for a house for his friends, probably the best 300mil he ever spent

[loreleidiangelo]

There are better ways to address the housing shortage than a monopolistic, ill-conceived auction system. Just my opinion.

As a random aside, it'd be a stupidly effective gil sink on high-pop servers, though.