Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k • Hacker News Board

Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k

#121

Post by dmurray » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #59

dmurray wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or...that you would be comfortable relocating if you did lose your job, helped by the buffer of savings you accumulated by not having to pay for your house?

Lets say housing appreciates +50% everywhere. Your podunk home went up $50k. HCOL home went up $500k. Better deal would be to hold the expensive house.

Aside from all the other objections from this: broadly speaking, if you lose your job and can't get another one, the economy will be bad and house prices will fall.

Not true for absolutely everyone, and as an individual you may feel you can't take this bet even though it's good in aggregate. A great social security system would allow you to take this bet without paying out too much to people who always made bad choices.

Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k

#122

Post by MrMember » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

burningChrome wrote: post #50

cliglot wrote: post #3

[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 requir…

I remember seeing a house for sale in Detroit that basically said you were on your own. No power, no water, and emergency services would not respond to your calls.

Re: Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k

#123

Post by sfn42 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

1-more wrote: post #117

sfn42 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't have a problem with liens, I have a problem with unregistered liens. There needs to be a system for registering and searching liens, it needs to be publicly accessible and the lien needs to be registered before it's valid. In order to register a lien on a car you need the owner's signature, that can't work when the owner has changed. Mechanic needs to get the contract signed then report the new lien to w…

> If they try to register their lien once the owner of the vehicle has changed, it can not be accepted. This is true in practice with houses, not in theory. Here's an example (differs by jurisdiction) of how the deadlines work for filing a lien: https://www.levelset.com/payment-help/question/can-we-lien-a... . The title search should include "are the sellers the defendants in a lawsuit wherein if they lose, the judgm…

Thanks for the detailed reply. This still seems ridiculous to me though:

> [..] generally, when a mechanics lien is filed after the sale of the property, a mechanics lien may still be able to attach to the project property as long as the other requirements for the lien claim were still followed.

Just why? The whole point of a lien is to be able to sell the house to raise money to pay the debt. The house is sold so now he can pay the debt. If he had so many debts that he's still underwater then the lien wouldn't have made a difference anyway, as the older debts would have to be paid first.

The way I understand this, the homeowner entered a contract with a mechanic allowing the mechanic to put a lien on the property to secure the debt for the mechanic's work. Then he sold the property before they did so. It seems to me there are now a couple reasonable courses of action:

Force the homeowner to pay the debt as it is no longer secured, or they could offer up something else as collateral for the debt.

It makes no sense to make the new homeowners pay for the repairs for some stranger's car. That's just wrong. The only way it could possibly make sense is if they explicitly agreed to take over the debt as part of the sale. Clearly this isn't how it works in the real world, I'm just baffled at how stupid the real world is. This seems so easy to fix. The only explanation I can come up with is the insurance companies lobby to keep it this way because they make a fortune selling title insurance that doesn't even need to exist.