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I 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.

I’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.

What about an auction? That’s how the housing market works in e.g. Norway.

That's definitely not fair either, as it disproportionally benefits those with more funds. Which only leads to wider inequality.

I didn’t mean to imply that lottery was the best system in all cases, just that it’s pretty much always better than first one wins. Though thinking about it more a lottery probably results in more total entries, and you might end up giving the thing to someone who is closer to ambivalent than the folks willing to stand in line at 5AM.

Auctions are a great way to see that the item ends up in the hands of the person who “values” it most, where value is measured in currency. It does have the problem that in a system of high inequality the people at the bottom have essentially zero chance of winning.

> 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.

Stocks should be traded this way, too. Having an arms race for fiber latency makes a mockery of the idea that they are for efficient allocation of capital. Queue up all the trades requested in each second/minute, then execute them in random order.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

What are you using to scrape listing data? afaik mls doesn't expose an api.

they don't, but Trulia/zillow/etc are getting it somehow, and there's clearly a database on the backend, so

Yeah and they probably pay out the nose for it. How do us plebes get these data?