Long Term Purchase Agent

(a) one day I expect I shall buy a house, but I keep seeing ones I want now. I write them down - cute terrace of houses called orchard bank in one town, half derelict villa for a renovation project in another. I want an agent (not an estate agent, just an agent for me who deals with what I want from any other agents) who I can leave these ideas with and say 'if ever a house from that street comes on the market, I want to know'. Then for every occasion that one does, out of the twenty places on my wish list, I can think 'hmm, can I afford that? is it the right time to move? can I get a job there?' and if ever the time is right I know that I would be buying one of my dream homes! Also, if this agency was a big national (or, wow, international!) one, and lots of people had wish lists of property, once in a while you could save on surveyors fees and the like, because it would only need to be done once and that data could be held by the agency (probably at a premium, I suppose) and more than one client could use it. But until the angency was really big there's not a lot of chance of two people being interested in teh same house I suppose.

(b) as a more personal example, I would like to travel to Alaska, the Andes, various Atlantic islands and Siberia, but I am not in any danger of having enough money to do it. I would like to save up for this and take the holiday whenever I can. But what if there is a deal on flights somewhere, and it's just at the time when I haven't got enough money, or I haven't got a break from work, or I've just bought something else expensive like a computer... the agent could have had my wish list of destinations and have monitored the ups and downs of travel costs, and know my budget and my windows of opportunity. They could come up with a range of options and itineraries that fit my ideas. How to match this with a list of friends with different wish lists and different holiday time windows... is my problem, not the agents!

(c)there are probably lots of long-term outlays that could use this service. I'll try to think of some more...