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It's also in, if you'll pardon my saying so, located in a shit-hole place to live. Look at the building across the street on google street view.
not always true or even the norm, I checked 3 near me and they are decent neighborhoods
Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#42[dead]
123,000 is still very cheap
Sure, maybe - but just because 123,000 is cheap doesn't mean it's OK to make your headline "You can buy a house from the government for $3,000" if the reality is that it's 40x as expensive and you don't actually get a house, you get a demolition project you have to complete in order to use the land.
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#43Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#44A lot of these houses probably come with massive debt attached, so really buying any of these homes is a ripoff, even if you just wanted them for the land. You will owe way more than what you paid. This website would be more interesting if it actually showed you the true cost. As it stands, it’s clickbait.
Downvoted for breaking this guideline: "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." The "It's clickbait" comment at the end made me feel pain for the site buider, and I didn't even put any work into the website. They made a thing and put it out in the world. Some people like it: as evidenced by other comments here. That they mention the top of the price r…
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Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#45I've gained a taste for a yt channel that shows depopulated towns across the US. It seems to me that local governments must also have tons of properties to sell or give away. The real issue is that these are in places where people don't usually want to live.
Peter Santenello does a great job of this.
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#46A few years ago an apartment in my building was up for a foreclosure sale. Price looked good but turned out it was literally impossible to figure out (1) how much or the original dead beat's mortgage i would be on the hook for (2) tax burden and (3) unpaid coop fees i would owe.
So even as finance save person already in the building, it was impossible to figure out what I'd be getting/owing. Really ruined my taste for these things.
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also in, if you'll pardon my saying so, located in a shit-hole place to live. Look at the building across the street on google street view.
not always true or even the norm, I checked 3 near me and they are decent neighborhoods
I’m curious about this but don’t want to dox you. Any guidance on how to find comparable examples?
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#48[dead]
> With $120,000 owed in back taxes due by you upon purchase. How does it work in the US? Are taxes on the property itself? This feels weird. I would have thought that the property can only be sold if everything is OK with it (no litigation, liens, etc), and taxes are owed by persons? Is it different over there?
> the property can only be sold if everything is OK with it (no litigation, liens, etc), and taxes are owed by persons? Is it different over there?
This could vary by jurisdiction, but as I understand it, taxes and liens are attached to the property itself. "Clean title" can be a contingency of offer: buyer can back out and get back their earnest money (aka deposit) if the property has liens/encumbrances that are not written down in the sales contract (example clause at the link at the end). When you buy the place, you get title insurance, often mandated by your mortgage lender. The title insurance company does a title search on the property to find liens and owed money on the property and then sells you an insurance policy saying that they'll make it right if they missed anything during their search. This is because your mortgage lender never wants to be second in line to get their hands on the property to recoup in case you default on your mortgage. Liens on the property should be easy to find because they're supposed to be registered with the local municipality: maybe the city you're in, maybe the county, maybe the state, idk I think it depends. In practice, maybe some roofer/plumber/landscaper forgot to do that and now you have a problem you didn't know you had. That's what the insurance is for. The property _status_ is not knowable so much as the _status transitions_ are knowable: when was a lien attached or removed from the property, so that's why it involves a private company looking it up. You'd think it'd be a public good, but it's not. Odd.
As an example: when I bought my current place, the previous owner was financing the furnace which included free annual service from the installer. He wanted us to take over the payments. We asked him to convey without encumbrances, meaning pay off the balance with the furnace company before we'd close on the house. If he had refused, we could have backed out of the sale because our offer said that we were only willing to buy without owing anyone anything.
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#49To paint a picture in your mind, this is the digital equivalent of being a rag & bone man scraping by to find a place to live somewhere, anywhere, across the country. Demand better of yourself if you're going to attempt to go to such lengths.
Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k
#50[dead]
This is the same thing that happened back in the day. I remember seeing ads to buy castles in Europe for under $10,000. I made a quip about it to my boss and he said he was seriously looking into it as he was really big into real estate at the time.
He assumed he would have to put some money into it, but not the millions the fine print said they would need to invest to bring it up to a livable standard - which required a ton of construction, electrical and plumbing as a starter. He kind of scoffed at it once he started learning all of the details.
I also remember seeing the same thing when entire blocks of houses were being sold during the housing crash after 2008. Majority of the houses were in really bad neighborhoods (the ads for houses in Detroit were eye opening) or conversely way TF out in never never land where some developer decided to build some neighborhood development that went belly up after the crash and was stuck with half finished houses and no way to pay to get them finished.