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Comment by pythonaut_16 | Hacker News Reader

That could be a cool exercise for your home. Document the various quirks and routines in a Github repository, then the new owner can gain access by forking it. Taking it a step farther, your family could submit issues or pull requests for various issues as they come up, generating an easy list of things that should be documented or fixed.

Now realistically the person buying your house probably doesn't know how to use Git and your family probably isn't gonna make pull requests, but it seems like a novel use of Git and Github. Maybe if it were effective enough a wrapper could be made?

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It would be in your interest to conceal the problems that your house has, in order to compete with the ignorance offered by everyone else. While this would benefit humanity, nobody would do it.

All houses have problems. The selling point is, "yeah, we have problems like everyone else, but they're out in the open, so you'll never be surprised and you'll have a clear gameplan to deal with all of them".

You're selling it as a mitigation of stress.

Except that many buyers would see this as an elaborate attempt to hide bigger issues...

YMMV. But I do this when I sell cars. I try to be up front with every issue I can, and take loads of pictures. Not only does it save people time, but I can basically say, "Well, I've factored all these things in already" and it's harder for them to use something like "there's a dent here" in negotiation, because I'm the one who brought it to the table. They also see me as more honest in my experience. Car sells faster.

On the flip side, I can only really get the true value of the car. If I didn't list the issues I could probably inflate the price and only discount on what they happen to find during inspection.

I've thought of something similar, but much less fancy. I just keep an OmniOutliner document where I log repairs, maintenance, specs for things like air filters, and that sort of thing.

If I'm alive when I stop living here, my plan is to print out the log and have it nicely bound, and turn that over to the next owners as something like a ship's log, but for a house instead of a ship.

I'll also leave a thumb drive with the OmniOutliner document, exports of that document in various formats [1], and a PDF of the print out.

[1] Probably HTML, Word, OPML, and RTF.

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