UnReal Estate – Game where you become a real estate mogul | Hacker News Reader

UnReal Estate – Game where you become a real estate mogul

xavils.github.io

70 pointsxavils46 comments

To all those players who became billionaires, and also to those financial advisors that show how anyone with modest income can become a multimillionaire in a 50-year working lifespan through the miracle of compound interest:

People have been investing in property, stocks, and in interest-earning bank accounts for centuries. Someone starting with $38,000 in 17th or 18th century would be worth trillions or quadrillions today[1], or at least their descendants would be.

So where are those trillionaires and quadrillionaires?

The problem is that over long spans of time (50+ years), there are wars, revolutions, devaluations, confiscations, hyperinflationary periods, and other economic disasters that have wiped out all savings.

There's no reason to assume that these things won't happen again when projecting over long periods.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2438000+at+6%25+for+40...

You need a 10.8% return over 100 years to become a billionaire with $38000.

10.8% would not be unheard of, over a shorter span at least, right?

I'd recommend renaming this to "Show HN" since it appears to be your own. FWIW, it's kind of fun considering how simple it is -- it feels like there's a kernel of a great game here. I found AdVenture Capitalist to be pretty addictive TBH.

Yeah, making it a bit more realistic might be interesting. Show your assumptions, etc.

Basic current assumptions (approximate):

- Boom 10 years - Recession 5 years

- Initial property price, rounded current price in city center for 2bdr in each city. Hong Kong is a little bit too expensive but I currently live there and it's so expensive that it had to be exagerated.

- The 20% you need to buy and 40 year mortgage is how the property sector was working until 2008 in my hometown, Barcelona, before the recession.

- Mortgage rate is 3%

- Rent you receive is around 7% of property value annually

- Inflation is +4% annually during boom and -6% during recession

- Savings return is around 1% annually

- owned property devaluation happens during 15 years until it reaches a minimum and then keeps up with recession/boom cycles

Sorry, quite new to HN. I just add "Show HN" to the tittle?

Prepend "Show HN: " to your title, I believe.

I guess only mods can do it. My bad!

Welcome to HN!

An ultra-TL;DR set of hints:

- read the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

- read the formatting help at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc (I'm guessing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411471 was supposed to be a bullet-point list)

- "self-posts" here are marked here by prepending to the title, typical types are "Show HN: ", "Tell HN: " and "Ask HN: "; this is all community conventions, although properly marked Show and Ask posts will show up on the lists linked in the top bar

- if you like to participate in HN discussions, you may find http://hnnotify.com/ handy

Enjoy your stay! :).

Thanks, I'm so lame!

Not lame, new :). HN isn't exactly intuitive, but that's AFAIK a design decision.

Never knew about hnnotify, thanks for that!

It's pretty cool, especially for holding discussions over the course of days, long after the article has fallen from the front page.

In the game you start with 38,000 dollars. For reference at a rate of return of 5.575% [0], this would yield on average 8.6 million after 100 years. I only mention this to give some idea of what the returns on investment are in the long term.

[0] The average return of S&P500 from 1915 to 2015 according to http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return-calculator/

EDIT: these figures are wrong because they don't include dividends. See thread below.

According to this we will see 21x inflation between 1999 and 2100. Just using cpi

http://www.halfhill.com/inflation_js.html

Just checked: the figure I gave was not inflation adjusted. In terms of real dollars, after 100 years your investment would be worth a measly $365,000.

Why didn't you include dividends? In that case, the parameters you entered would give a RoR of 9.9970%?

Oops, you're right, I overlooked that. So it would be 520 million after 100 years (22 million after accounting for inflation).

got 3.91B on the first try. Buy as many as you can whenever you think the recession is about to end, and sell at the top of the boom.

What's interesting is that I liked getting into as much debt as possible at all times. At a certain point I got confused and thought my net worth was decreasing because my debt was going from -200 to -25 or so. I then went and got myself into half a billion in debt straight after, and came out a billionaire a few minutes later. I like this game.

That's pretty good. I never sold once and just clicked max buy as fast as possible. Got 3b or so. I stopped buying in 2073 or so.

5B that time. Stopped buying in 2080. I would sell and be able to immediately buy in higher tier cities for some reason. Seemed like a bug? Not sure what was going on.

You guys are way better than me, my max is 1.3B

Definitely a fun start to a game. Reminds me of Adventure Capitalist and predating that Dope Wars and some similar games. It definitely needs to have independent boom/bust cycles for each city as right now there is no reason to touch most of the mid-priced areas.

Also I think the boom/bust cycles need to be a little bit more volatile. Right now it's far too easy to buy low and sell high as fast as you can click.

Yep, Adventure Capitalist was my inspiration, I was addicted to the game a few months ago and thought it would be nice to do it with real estate. And to challenge my coding skills as well.

I will improve boom/bust soon.

Nice game, I really like the presentation.

My only suggestion would be to somehow mitigate the amount of clicking required at later stages of the game. Perhaps some sort of press and hold functionality.

The hilarious part about this is the fact that the clicking represents the time it would take to manage / buy / sell property when you're that rich.

It's not quite this easy :)

Nice idea. Added to the list of upcoming features.

Have a look at http://propertypartner.co/ which looks to be the same thing but for real :-)

Yes, I've seen a few companies do this in recent years. It's a nice concept.

Hi! I really like your game. However, selling apartments will remove too much playerDebt. If I buy the first apartment in Athens and I sell it one year later, I get from 38k to 47.2k after just one year! There's a similar bug with cancelling mortgage, I think you made a mistake in computing the constant 2.22 in your code.

Thanks for the concern. The logic behind the scenes goes like this:

- You pay 20K for a house.

- You owe 80K + 80K * 2.5% * 40 years. That's your total debt.

- If you want to cancel the mortgage, you must pay 80K, and your net worth will go up because you do not have the 40 year mortgage anymore (even if you just paid 80K).

- If you buy and sell one year after, the same happens with mortgage towards your net worth. In terms of savings, during 1 year you will get approx 600 * 12 rent, -350 * 12 mortgage. That's 3K more. Then your remaining savings will go up 1% (as savings account return) which is around 200. Last, Since it's a boom in the economic cycle, while your debt will have diminished, the value of your house will have increased. So basically you sell the house for more, owe less and that is the result.

This situation is what makes the world go crazy over real estate, become overbought and then, BOOM. Economic crisis.

Managed to get 1.11b on second try. Anyone know what the optimal strategy is here? Should I pay off the debts or keep them?

I've only played through once, but got 1.66B and felt I could probably get higher pretty easily.

My strategy was to initially buy high/sell low to get net value up so I could purchase higher value properties. By the time I could buy the most expensive properties I had stopped selling anything. Whenever a recession ended I would simply buy as many of the most expensive thing possible before the price raised too much. Similarly I would cancel any debts, and do any maintenance as soon as the bottom of the recession hit. Buying properties seemed to cancel the need to refurbish, but I haven't looked at how complex the logic is so I'm not sure.

I got to 8b second try. Get to the most valuable property as soon as possible and then ignore everything else not worth you time/clicks. Then buy as much as you can early in the Boom when prices are lowest. When a Recession starts, start selling everything while the prices are still high. Rinse and repeat. I kept all the debts until the end.

This only really works because the boom/bust cycle is too predictable and consistent, so it really just becomes a 'how fast can you click' game. It would be better if a) more random boom/bust points, duration, and rate of rise/decline, and b) buy and sell in bulk.

To increase difficulty, I would try two things:

1. have the boom/recession cycle independent for each city

2. make the cycle more complex, potentially by adding multiple cycles of different periodicity together (wave addition)

These could be combined to, for example, have long period boom/recession cycles globally, and shorter term local cycles.

Was really fun overall :)

Liquidity crises, not being able to refinance debt.

Love both ideas! Will definitely implement it and have global recessions with mini city-cycles. This way it will make more sense to buy one or the other.

Awesome game!

Just like the similary addictive classic Drug Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars) game you just have to buy low and sell high which is not so easy in RL.

Buy as many as you can, do nothing else, sell at 2090. Ended with 30 billion net worth. I have to sell at 2090, because I need to click thousands of times to sell all the estate.

Ah, I played on touch with the 350 ms delay. Desktop browser you could probably buy more.

Increase keyboard repeat speed, and hold enter key to buy and sell. But I still can not spend as quickly as I earn.

I don't like it if a new tab starts playing music without my agreement. On top of that the music is really annoying.

Well, it's a game and games have music. I see what you mean though. Probably should start music after game starts, not before.

I'm probably biased cause my wife created the music.

i'm pretending those are street names in suburb. otherwise the tax forms alone would be enough to drive anyone mad.

Fun Game! really liked the idea

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