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Thursday, February 23, 2006

Diceboy sets record for winning the SF condo lottery

For those of you who do not already know, Rena and I went in with our downstairs neighbors and bought our property. This includes our building and the single family house behind us. We closed in mid-January. A few days after we closed our realtor took us out to dinner with our money and asked us if we were going to buy a ticket for the lottery. I said, "no, I don't generally play unless it is over about $50 million or so." He said, "No, I mean the condo lottery. The deadline to enter is in 5 days."

So I did a little research and it turns out that there is a once a year condo lottery in SF where owners who meet certain criteria can enter a lottery in which the winners get the right to sub-divide their property into condos. (There are 4 units on our property, so turning it into condos would be very appealing.) A lot of people enter each year and only a few win. The lottery is weighted such that you have a greater chance of winning each year that you enter. Your chance of winning in year 4 is around 30%. This year, they changed the rules to make the chance of winning in your first 3 years almost impossible. The chance of winning in year one was lowered to about 1.5%. We were not planning on holding the property for that long, so our initial thought was that the odds were so low it wasn't worth it. Then we thought, "hey, it's only $150, why not."

We got exactly 1 ticket in the drawing. There were over 1,300 tickets in the pool, and we qualified for about 20 of the pulls (I think there were about 45 pulls all together). Low and behold, our ticket was pulled. Cha-ching! I think this increased the value of our property by about 15-20% overnight.

Expected time for the average person to win the condo lottery: 5.5 years
Time for Diceboy to win: 2 weeks

--Dice

Posted by diceboy | 4:58 PM | E-mail this post   

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