Escrow app

Say you want to buy a house. The seller doesn't want to advertise a price because that might either: a) be well under what a buyer is willing to pay or b) too far over what the market can afford (and scare away buyers). The seller also doesn't want to auction because that restricts the number of potential buyers by restricting the time frame for selling. So the seller puts the house on the market under the title 'by negotiation'.

Basically this creates a 'Mexican standoff'; neither the buyer or seller wants to show their hand by indicating the price they are willing to buy/sell.

What I propose is an escrow app for phones. The app is very simple: the buyer types into their phone the maximum price they are willing to pay, while the seller types into their phone the minimum price they are willing to sell for. The buy/sell prices are transmitted via bluetooth (or via the internet for telephone negotiations); if the maximum buy price is greater than the minimum sell price, the app displays a message "A deal is possible" otherwise it displays "A deal is not possible". If a deal is possible the app might also then give a helpful suggested starting point for negotiations to begin from; this starting point is somewhere (randomly) in between the maximum buy and minimum sell price. From that point the buyers and sellers still have to negotiate the price the old fashioned way.

Crucially, the buy/sell price is automatically and immediately deleted by the app after the comparison and suggestion is made. The app would be made as secure as possible with suitable transmission protocols and encryption of buy/sell data. This escrow system could be 'cracked' if there was a conspiracy between enough potential buyers, so the seller would have to be wary of any suspicious buyer behaviour (or the app itself could have an algorithm to detect suspicious behaviour).

Of course this escrow service could have been performed by a human, but finding a person that both parties trust for each negotiation would be difficult and time consuming.

Hopefully this will make negotiations fairer and more efficient.