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Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

Growing up, I lived on an isolated 4 acre block, surrounded by forest. The only house nearby was an old house, built on stumps, a hundred meters or so away, with no-one living in it. One day a truck showed up, a team of workers put the house on the back of the truck, and took it away.

A year later detectives arrived at our house. They asked to speak to my mother, and told her that the house next door had actually been stolen, and the real owners were now looking for leads, hoping to find their stolen house.

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That reminded me of something that happened to a guy I went to high school. Not quite as dramatic as your story but during the day when he was at school and his parents were at work some guys backed a moving truck up to the house and emptied the place.

This is in a city. The family in question weren't particularly friendly with their neighbors but at least one neighbor saw the guys playing with the family dog in the front yard and assumed all was well (as you probably would).

They apparently quickly got everything loaded up and were on their way. The family came home to an essentially empty house. It was very odd.

This happens every single day in Brazil.

Most of my friends had their whole houses wiped out on holidays. Once a year it happens to one of my friends that have houses on non closed streets at least.

was the dog OK?

The dog was fine. If anything I suspect it enjoyed the extra play time.

In Queensland in Australia there's a style of housing called an Old Queenslander - basically a house on stilts to help the occupants deal with the heat and humidity. As the whole house is up on stilts, this means you can move the house as a single item (no slab)... which means that you can have a 'used house lot', where you go and pick the house you want from the 'showroom' and have it shipped to wherever.

I was living in Brisbane, Queensland, at the time (in Ferny Hills, if you know it), and the house was a Queenslander. I imagine the house may well have been laundered through such a service.

OT but I don't care, as I love being reminded how small the world is...I lived in Arana Hills in the 90's/2000's and went to Ferny Hills primary. I can imagine this would be easily possible in that area :)

I'm sitting in an office about five minutes from Arana Hills right now (in Mitchelton)!

And I'm fifteen minutes away in the suburb of Virginia, wondering if anyone will ever steal Breaka Beach at Southbank?

Well, it has the added benefit that you can sell your house instead of just demolishing it, if you plan to build a new house.

I live in such a house, nearby in Kedron, and we're considering doing just that.

I would normally say that a valuable asset that goes a year without being used isn't really lost when it goes missing.

It's like a mining company buying a plot of land that they know has valuable minerals on it for the sake of sitting on it to make their other plots more valuable. It's the exact position I think governments should tax/seize to the point that it is inefficient to sit on.

Thankfully these situations are rarer and rarer with the sharing economy allowing illiquid assets to actually be used for their intended purpose when not used by their owner.

Mining companies often sit on mines, not because they're trying to manipulate the market, but because the mineral isn't economic to extract yet. You can, for example, buy a gold mine today where the cost to extract gold is $2000/oz, and wait until the price goes above that before starting operations.

Cool logic... the money you have in your savings account that you haven't touched for two years should be given to charity. Thank you for your donation.

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