I Want Your House, dot com

Let's say there's a house in your neighborhood or town that you would LOVE to buy -- if only it were on sale. You would be willing to wait, for months or even years if necessary, for that house to go on the market -- if ONLY it'd go on the market!

You could, I suppose, write a letter to the owner of the house and sent it to their address. (This happened to me once: I owned some property and got a letter one day years after buying it, from someone willing to buy it for twice what I paid).

Or, you could go to a site, say, IWantYourHouse.com, where you could type in the street address, city, state, and zip code, and then provide an email address to get instant notification the moment the house goes on the market (say, gets listed in the MLS or in one of the major real estate listing sites). Perhaps you could leave a message to the owner. Perhaps IWantYourHouse.com would send the letter on its stationery:

Dear (Owner's Name, as registered in the county deeds office):

IWantYourHouse.com currently has three customers who have indicated that they would like to buy your house. Here are their letters to you.

Customer A writes: etc, etc, etc."

Curious homeowners could also use IWantYourHouse.com to find out if anybody wants their house! Imagine the thrill of going online, typing in your own address, and seeing a search result that says something like:

Address: 123 Main Street

Interested Parties: 27

Twenty-seven people want your house! And here, you were thinking of moving to something bigger, but weren't in the mood to deal with real estate agents and everything. Now you know there's already a demand, and you haven't had to lift a finger or pay a cent to find out.

I checked, and the domain's taken. I emailed the domain owner, who wrote back telling me he's planning on setting up a real estate website. I wonder what he'll do with it . . .

Of course, by extension this sort of service naturally leads to IWantYourCar.com, IWantYourBike.com, IWantYourConcertTickets.com, IWantYourBusinessNetwork.com, IWantYourJob.com . . . :-)

Posted by brian at January 14, 2004 03:49 PM