9am on a Saturday morning is not a time I normally see much of, but today I was outside the sales office at Bayport Alameda along with many other prospective house buyers for the first lottery for houses in the new housing community on Alameda.

Not the most organised event I’ve ever been to (I could have made several suggestions for ways to get the whole operating proceeding much, much more efficiently), but by 10am they had all the numbers in plastic boxes ready for the drawings (one for the next phase of Cove houses, and one for Harbor houses).

The drawings were relatively quick, and the house I was interested in was chosen by the first person drawn, so no new house today. The prices also took a fairly significant jump in price (about 5%) from the previous phase.

There are a number of things about the way that Warmington Homes, the builder, are running this that puzzle me:

1. Why have these ridiculous lotteries when you have 485 houses to sell? The only reason I can see is that it lets them create artificial demand and pump the prices up.
2. Why are they selecting the options, and it seems from today’s sale, even some of the upgrades, rather than letting the new home buyer select them – the houses are not even started yet, so letting the buyer decide shouldn’t have any impact on the schedules.
3. How come some of the houses in the lots being sold today were pre-sold? And how can I get one of those?
4. Why are they not able to tell people what the options selected for each model being sold are before the day of the sale? For that matter, why not make the prices available too.
5. Why do I have to keep turning up to the lotteries until I win the chance to buy a house? Surely, I could just put my name on a list along with the models and/or lots that interest me and they could do the whole thing without requiring me to be there?

Just some thoughts. I guess I will be there for the next one too though, so I might be seeing a lot more of 9am on a Saturday over the summer this year.

I have also put up a copy of the n (with some annotations for where the models are, and where today’s lots were). I will try to update it after each sale (assuming I go to them). Also, remember that the reason given for not having this plan as a take-away document in the sales office was that it might change – if I see it has become outdated (or somebody lets me know), then I will try to get a new photo and update it, but no promises there.

Nov 6, 2004 Update: I have added a category for Bayport posts to the blog, moved all the existing posts to this new category and also added a new entry with some info about today, and some graphs of the prices over time for the various plans.

This morning was the special viewing of the new homes being built in Alameda on the site of the old naval base housing: Bayport Alameda. The grand opening is next week, but for those who were registered on their mailing list, and like me have been watching the houses appear, today was a chance to look around.

There are 10 models (9 real ones, and the sales office which is also a model, though much harder to imagine because of the changes made to make it a viable sales office space). Of the 10, the four in the photos below were our favourites (though I could easily live in any of the ten models):

The four models shown are:

1. Cove – Malpeque
2. Cove – Trinity
3. Harbor – Athena
4. Pointe – Riviera