Real Estate Video Game

I’ve often thought that an interesting game would be a simulation that takes you through a few decades of a real estate investor’s career. Yes, yes I’ve heard of monopoly, you’re very funny!

What I envision would involve analyzing properties, determining the cash flow, and dealing with unexpected changes in market conditions and interest rates and whatnot. Probably it’d work better as a single player game, or if it was a multi-player game it would be fairly non-competitive.

Robert T Kiyosaki has a game, “Cash Flow” which is a step towards this idea (and he even made it with the idea of using it to help teach people about money), however its pretty lame (and I’d find it frightening if anyone actually felt better prepared to manage their finances after playing it).

Probably the game I’d imagine would in some way involve people balancing their time and money. They’d find and manage properties (with more potential problems as they got more properties), decide when to keep properties or when to sell them. Potentially it could work off of the computer as a game with cards or something (but there’d be a lot of book keeping tracking mortgages and whatnot). If it was on a computer, I’d make it as much of a simulation (instead of a game) as possible, and hopefully get it to mimic the real world as much as possible.

I’d ideally love it if it illustrated the idea of exponential gains, that things start of slow, and really pick up speed once compounding kicks in (which I don’t think is a very intuitive concept for many of us, we usually have a very linear perspective on life).

Nothing at all like what I’m describing, but I came across a silly, fun real estate game: Mansion Impossible. You should be able to figure out within 20 or 30 seconds what the strategy is then follow it until you win.