I recently bought my first house in the greater Wellington area, so have spent the last four or so months dealing with real estate agents. I think anything to reduce their influence is probably going to be popular. The fixed commission is probably a good move as it makes you look more neutral, unlike agents who wants the highest sale price possible.
From a buyer's point of view the biggest problem with the site is the low number of listings, but I imagine that will grow with time. Best of luck.
I didn't realise most puzzles change, I just answered the Meaning of Life three times and assumed I was cheating.
As for the sickle balance, I did find it, but think having username and balance on the top right works well on HN. Somewhere near the top would be an improvement on having it in the footer.
I didn't have any trivia questions in mind, I just figured the kind of people who like puzzles are probably mostly the same as those who like trivia. Maybe that's too easy to game though.
I registered just to see what the puzzles were. Some thoughts:
I found that you can answer the same puzzle multiple times, which you probably want to change.
For three of the puzzles, if you submit a blank form the website breaks.
You should make it more obvious how many sickles a user has. And why are they sickles anyway?
I don't know if this breaks your idea, but maybe add trivia questions as well as puzzles. That might be helpful when you're struggling to find new puzzles, and if a theme built up it might help build a community.
HearWhere placed me in Mt Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand which is slightly off but very close.
Two minor things: 1) "DJ Carlito" came up as "�J CARLITO" and when I clicked on "Peaches" the "About Peaches" section was for a different group. Otherwise I thought it was pretty good.
I highly recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. The title is not very imaginative but I found it a great place to start before looking at more complicated concepts.
I'm not a game theorist, but wouldn't people just game SpecArena the same way spammers game digg and reddit now? By 'game' I mean automatically rate the competition with low scores and have voting-gangs/bots give their own submissions high scores.
Except it would probably be worse because there would be more at stake.
If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII character was used.
From a buyer's point of view the biggest problem with the site is the low number of listings, but I imagine that will grow with time. Best of luck.