> You can buy a house from the government for $3,000
With $120,000 owed in back taxes due by you upon purchase. Also the structure is derelict and will have to be destroyed before anything can be done with it.
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.
in 2012 I had a chance to buy a duplex in a relatively desirable neighborhood for $25k. It needed about $25k in rehab, but $50k in that area was unheard of.
My (now ex) wife was against buying it because we had not bought a home for ourselves yet, and even trying to explain that we could buy it, live in one side, rent the other for the full cost of the mortgage and then some was not enough to convince her, so I let it slide as no amount of money was worth the never-ending argument that it would have caused.
That duplex is worth about $450k now, and if I had gone through with it it would have generated a conservative $200k in rent income in the meantime.
If I had known the relationship would have been over in less than 5 years from that point, I probably would have bought it anyway, but at the time my mentality was "happy wife, happy life", naively thinking that there was a way to make someone happy who refused to be happy.
Maybe the restoration would have been a (or another) point of friction, and perhaps the project would not have gone well because of it. You could have sold for breakeven, or less. Then you (and/or she) would have blamed that as the reason things went south.
Or it could have gone well and you could have lost your share in a divorce.
I don't really have a point ... maybe, bygones and all ...
There was an episode of Fixer Upper where Chip and Joanna helped their carpenter buy a house for 15K. The neighborhood was dystopian. Presumably people were using the house for shooting practice as its one side was entirely bullet riddled.
Depends. I know people who got property from the city's sort of "land bank" operation for $1. No they did not have to pay any back taxes on it even though that is how the city got it from the original owners. The city even destroyed the old structure, backfilled it, and maintained the lot with regular mowing before it traded hands. Seems the city was desperate to just hand it over to someone to get it off their books really.
> 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.
As an aside, I'm told that Title companies make absolute bank. Most buyers get title insurance, but the insurer very rarely ever has to make a payment.
This is because all lenders require title insurance as a requirement for receiving the loan monies. So for almost all buyers they have no choice, their bank/credit union that is actually putting up most of the money forces it upon them.
Not all buyers are using loans. First house I sold was to someone who refused title insurance because in his words, "that house has been sold 3 times in 10 years, the title's fine."
> In practice, maybe some roofer/plumber/landscaper forgot to do that and now you have a problem you didn't know you had
Seems to me like this should be the contractor's problem. If they did the job 2 weeks ago fine, but if they come along 6+ months later after the house is sold demanding payment from the new owner that seems ridiculous to me. Surely if these Liens are supposed to be public there needs to be a requirement that they are registered as soon as possible.
Otherwise it seems to me like this is a ripe opportunity for scams. Buy house, have contractors refurbish it, sell it for a much higher value, then the contractors register their debts and now the new buyers or their insurance is on the hook for the refurbishment.
> Otherwise it seems to me like this is a ripe opportunity for scams. Buy house, have contractors refurbish it, sell it for a much higher value, then the contractors register their debts and now the new buyers or their insurance is on the hook for the refurbishment.
This is called ‘fraud’, it is already illegal.
Mechanic’s liens are good and necessary for customers like the current US President who fail to pay their contractors.
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 wherever it should be reported, and once that's all in order they can start working on the vehicle.
If they try to register their lien once the owner of the vehicle has changed, it can not be accepted. You can't secure debt with a vehicle you no longer own. The lender needs to make sure the person owns the car and register the debt while they still own the car. And if they sell the car then they have money to pay the debt, and since they no longer own the car then their debt is no longer secured so that should trigger a requirement to pay the debt per the loan contract. Debt should be owned by people not objects.
The whole concept of debt that's attached to objects is silly. It can make sense in certain situations like a housing association that's taking up a shared loan and paying it down as part of shared monthly expenses, but for a car repair or similar it makes no sense. The person who takes the debt is responsible for the debt. If they sell the car then they pay the debt with the money from the sale, if the sale doesn't cover the debt then they still owe the rest.
It does not need to be any more complicated than this. In order for anyone to take over responsibility for debt in relation to a purchase, there needs to be explicit written and signed consent. So - I can buy a house including some debt if I know and agree to it, but I can't unwittingly buy a landmine. If the owner fails to resolve their debts when they sell that should be their problem not the buyer's. It's up to the bank to collect their debts from the person they have a contract with.
> 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 judgment results in a lien on the property." We actually went under contract on a house where the owner's name matched someone in bankruptcy and triggered this. We knew the guys were different (ages, addresses) but our mortgage lender needed the title company to figure out their mistake first. So the lien attaching to a house that sells in the meantime is a really extraordinary circumstance: closings usually take 30 days so what are the odds that something gets filed in that meantime without already being underway? If the lien does attach to the house, then the buyer would have a tort against the seller for putting them on the hook, but the mechanic would have a backstop for getting paid in the form of the lien. The buyer could get a judgment against the seller. But that'll all be handled by the title insurance if it ever comes to that.
> The person who takes the debt is responsible for the debt. If they sell the car then they pay the debt with the money from the sale, if the sale doesn't cover the debt then they still owe the rest.
This is how it really works in practice. The mortgage company won't let you buy the house with the liens still attached. The debts will get paid out of the purchase price of the house. Who gets paid what out of the sale price is already determined before the actual closing date, and the mortgage company writes separate checks to everyone who needs to get paid (I think). The insurance is there in case something very out of the ordinary happens. Even the cost of paying someone to figure out who gets what is part of that insurance policy (again, I think).
> If the owner fails to resolve their debts when they sell that should be their problem not the buyer's.
It effectively is. The title search before the closing reveals all of this and pauses the sales process. Nothing proceeds until they come up with a plan to pay it off. The insurance is only for extraordinary circumstances where someone messed up the recording of the lien.
> 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.
This would be the best. I'd love it if it were federal so you just had to search one thing. Bankruptcy is federal, so why not this? Even better: if the system could record the house going under contract. You're a roofer who's been lazy suing somebody. Every Monday you upload the CSV of addresses that owe you money. One of those days, you see "this house is now under contract and you have 5 days until the window to register lawsuits against the sellers closes" You call your lawyer and tell them to start the lawsuit for the unpaid debt. Sellers and buyers get notified that the title isn't clear and there's a suit worth $X to work out.
This then produces the problem of people monitoring every address in their town and threatening the parties to the sale with a baseless lawsuit in order to pause the sale. You may have to bring back corporal punishment to stop such individuals. Hmm. Much to consider.
Very commonly in the U.S. are liabilities that "run with the land", not the owner. This is done intentionally.
Easements can be a huge headache too e.g. some utility may have an easement to come on your property at any time and do a whole list of activities to maintain a pipeline, or power line, or what have you.
yeah I had a neighbor spend a lot of time and money planting flowers only to have the city destroy all of it when it was time for new utilities heh. You need to know about easements.
I find mineral rights interesting. You can own some land, say 20 acres, and then discover something valuable under it like oil but then it turns out the rights to that oil are owned by someone else. Further the owner of those mineral rights can drill on the surface of the land, which you own, without your permission.
It varies by state and sometimes even county. Sometimes you buy the property outright (a deed), sometimes you buy the debt (a lien), so the original owner pays you back with interest but they keep the property unless you foreclose, and sometimes you buy the right to the land if the original owner doesn't pay you back within a set time frame. (a redemption deed)
In general, when it's sold as a deed, and sometimes as a redemption deed, non-government liens on the property are forfeit, and it clears out the taxes owed by the government entity selling it, but it doesn't clear out other government liens, e.g. when a property is sold to pay county property tax, the federal government could have a lien on it for income tax owed by the same owner, and the county could have a lien on it for sidewalk repair, and a mortgage company could have a lien for a loan. The mortgage company would be unable to collect anything, the federal tax lien would likely allow the government to force you to sell it to them for what you paid for it, but they wouldn't be entitled to collect from you, because it's the previous owner who pays taxes, but you could still be required to pay the county lien for sidewalk, plus penalties accrued since the previous owners non payment started, because you now own that property and its sidewalk.
Even if there’s no tax or other liens, demolishing a house probably costs $10-20k, my guess is that the $3000 minus $15,000 would equal the rough cost of an empty lot in the same area, $12k.
It needs to be torn down and rebuilt. It's not a large plot. It doesn't seem to be in an attractive location. For all we know the water is undrinkable. I suspect its true value is negative.
Heh, some landowner near me owned a piece of contaminated property. Technically worthless but was getting some lease money for a shop on the property. I think their game plan was for the city to grow and it being valuable to excavate one day for a condo or other building. Soil remediation is a lot cheaper when you dig anyway.
Transit agency tried to expropriate for a train station at market value: ie $0.
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.
Yeah, "almost certainly needs serious work" in that first home was doing some serious heavy lifting - the roof has collapsed and the foundation has sunk.
It's hard to actually use this map and inspect individual homes. Clicking into a listing replaces the map view, so you lose the context of where you were looking, and the way the dots animate in make it harder to visually remember where you were. And you can't zoom in further to distinguish multiple overlapping properties.
You still go back to the complete map when you navigate back out of a listing, so it doesn't really help much. The state-level zoom helps a little but it's not enough to distinguish markers in the same city, for example.
I'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.
Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here". I know lots of people optimistic that remote work would upend this, but even the few still-fully-remote workers I know need to live in areas where they or their family can find non-remote jobs if ever necessary.
It's not even just wanting jobs for family; it's wanting to be around services that I think people don't always consider. Sure, you could plan on doing everything yourself if that's truly your hobby, but most remote workers will want to be able to call a plumber or an electrician when something goes wrong, and even finding tradesmen in those locations can sometimes be challenging.
The clawing back of remote jobs is pretty astounding. More places are 3 days a week I guess. But the idea of living out in the country with no one around, but with your remote job is nearly fantasy. You have to be very sure that if push comes to shove, you won't ever be laid off, fired, company closes, etc.
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?
Now let's say the price collapses by 50%. You're stuck and can't sell in a "frozen" housing market... like how the housing market has been since May 2022. And the problem is structural. And it's only going to get worse as interest rates continue to rise to battle inflation. Here's a nice explainer.
The assumption for a couple of generations has been that housing costs will always increase over time as a percent of wages. The problem with that is that it's unsustainable. The next generation has to be able to afford it in order to buy it, and they also need to buy food and utilities etc., which also cost more when real estate does. Investors can't save you either when the next generation can't afford the rent they would have to charge to turn a profit.
But in order for housing to be a good investment, it has to have competitive returns with other investments, i.e. it needs to increase by at least as much as GDP per capita. Meanwhile median wages have been increasing slower than GDP per capita, which as above is the long-term cap on housing prices. In other words, housing can't long-term sustainably beat other market investments unless wages do, which they haven't, in which case people would get better returns by putting their money in stocks etc.
Worse, years of ZIRP inflated housing prices beyond any sustainable level even with the scarcity being maintained by existing zoning restrictions, i.e. the "eventually it's not sustainable" point is already in the past.
The result is that in order for housing to be a good investment going forward from now, there would first have to be a major housing crash so that "investors" (i.e. home buyers) could buy low instead of buying high. Which thereby implies that it wouldn't be a good long-term investment at current prices. And by major housing crash, notice what "enormous housing bubble that crashed the world economy" looks like on this chart in 2007 and compare it to what things look like since then, especially since 2020:
Nothing you said is wrong, but you could say that in 2013 too, and in that time apparently prices have nearly doubled and you missed out if you didn't take advantage.
Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.
> Nothing you said is wrong, but you could say that in 2013 too, and in that time apparently prices have nearly doubled and you missed out if you didn't take advantage.
In 2013 you couldn't say that prices have nearly doubled since 2013 under ZIRP, which is the argument that buying now would be buying high.
> Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.
You're not down more than your down payment plus whatever principal and interest you've paid since then.
On top of that, it's still leverage. Suppose you buy a $1M house with a $200k down payment and ~$5000/mo going to principal and interest. In five years you've paid out the $200k down payment, another ~$50k in principal and ~$250k in interest. If the value at that point declines by 25% since you bought, you're not down 25%, you're wiped out, -$500k, because you're left with a $750k house where you still owe $750k having already paid $500k. Let's say it's only -$380k because you'd have had to pay $2000/month to rent a smaller apartment in the alternative.
Whereas if you put the $380k into non-leveraged investments and the market declined by 25%, you'd still have $285k instead of $0. If the overall market does better than housing or it was "safe" investments like CDs then you'd still have the entire $380k plus whatever interest it earned. Worse yet, if housing costs declined then your monthly rent would go down but your mortgage is fixed for 30 years.
You could still make the argument that it's worth it to take the leverage if the upside is expected to be large, i.e. you expect the value to keep going up, but suppose you don't.
> In 2013 you couldn't say that prices have nearly doubled since 2013 under ZIRP, which is the argument that buying now would be buying high.
But in 2013 you could say they've nearly doubled since 1998 under ZIRP, and then everything you say applies.
It's also an option on continuing to live in your same COL but a different city, with a nice large house. Worse case, prices fall enough you can afford a new mortgage even if your investment is wiped out. Worst case of renting is you can never buy because houses appreciate faster than you can save. You said
> then you'd still have the entire $380k plus whatever interest it earned.
And it's not enough to buy a house if prices continue up, and you've lived in a cheap (so probably small and undesirable) apartment for years while your friends are building up their household.
In 1998 it was ~4 having been stable in the 4 to ~4.5 range since the late 1970s. By 2013 it was ~5, from being five years into ZIRP. The peak in the housing crisis bubble was 6.8. Right now it's ~7.
> Worse case, prices fall enough you can afford a new mortgage even if your investment is wiped out.
Where are you getting another down payment having been wiped out? The original down payment was $200k. It only takes a 25% decline to wipe you out and even at the lower price you'd need another $150k to get a new mortgage. And just after a crash would be the time to buy, but that's when you'd have just been zeroed out.
You might be better off to keep the existing house even if you're slightly underwater on it, at least then you don't need to sink another down payment, but then you're stuck continuing to pay the mortgage for a million dollar house when it's only worth $750k.
And there is also a third option. Suppose the prices don't move significantly up or down for a while. Then the leverage neither wipes you out nor gives you leveraged returns, but it means you're paying the interest on that $800k loan while getting no return from it.
> Worst case of renting is you can never buy because houses appreciate faster than you can save.
Which is precisely the problem with buying if that's the thing that actually happens to other people. If prospective buyers can't afford to buy your house for the high price anymore then you can't sell it for the high price anymore, so the next thing that happens is that the price comes down.
> And it's not enough to buy a house if prices continue up, and you've lived in a cheap (so probably small and undesirable) apartment for years while your friends are building up their household.
Which is again predicated on the prices continuing to go up. How high can the home price to income ratio get before something gives?
I was thinking the same thing 10 years ago, but people are still buying houses, the stock market keeps going up. It doesn't make sense. But I lost a lot of money not being more heavily invested and buying a house I could easily afford. I also feel like we're a zombie economy that doesn't know it's dead yet, but all I know is somehow I'm going to be screwed and I won't see it coming.
If there are no good doctors, dentists, schools, stores, and so in within reasonable distance then life kind of sucks even if you aren't concerned about money/other jobs.
If those things are within a reasonable distance, then so are jobs (well, as about as much as "normal" at least).
I get what you're saying and I see that how my comment could be interpreted.
I wish I had worded it better.
The most vibrant places in the world (again, IME) have a diversity of abilities, backgrounds, ages, and economic status.
There's another type of place - the sort of place I had in mind - that doesn't. That attracts people who are trying to get away from law and any sort of social contract. Some of those places look attractive on the surface. That's the sort of place I'm talking about. They're probably not as common as they seem to be to me.
I think something important to consider as well is quality of basic services. I've been permanently remote since 2015, and I've moved three times since then. But as a remote worker, I spend most my time in my home and that means it needs high quality water, high quality air, high quality internet, and high quality electrical services. If I cannot get all of these, it's a non-starter. I have absolutely zero faith in getting all of these services of sufficiently high quality for the majority of homes listed on this site, and in many cases I would expect /none/ of these services to be sufficiently high quality. Most of these houses are located in places I would never live, they are essentially negative value locations (in very real terms, not just monetarily).
All that said, I live in one of the lowest cost of living major metros in the US, and I bought a house in an acceptably decent neighborhood w/ high quality water, electrical, and air, and 5 gigabit symmetric fiber service for under $300k. You don't need to spend millions to find an acceptable place to live when you work remotely, but that doesn't mean you want to live in a HUD foreclosure in some of the worst most blighted neighborhoods in the country where you can't rely on even basic services and are going to be immediately a target of violent crime.
OP, your site makes for nice reading, but that quantity-sorted list of states to filter by is kind of maddening to work with. Alphabetical recommended :)
A 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.
Years ago when I was thinking of moving, I started looking at houses with my real estate agent. I started asking about foreclosure sales and he said the same thing. Seller and seller's agent will try and obfuscate the numbers to make it look attractive and essentially "stick" the buyer with something that costs way more than its worth.
It's crazy how this isn't simple. Surely all they have to do is to tally up the debts secured by the apartment, then sell the apartment and use the money to pay as much of the debts as possible. Any remaining debt is the lender's loss, that's the risk they take when giving out loans.
If any debt does need to be tied to the apartment rather than the person, then it simply needs to be registered in a publicly (easily) accessible way. If someone fails to register their debt in a timely manner then it should be forfeit. It should be registered at the time it takes effect. Lender should be responsible for making sure the registration is complete before giving out the debt, if someone takes out a loan then sells it before the debt has been registered that's the lender's problem. They can't retroactively add a lien to my property because the previous owner took a loan when it was their property. That's not reasonable. If the lien is not registered then it doesn't exist, it should be that simple.
I feel like any statement with "surely all they have to do" is going to miss some nuance.
In this particular case the apartment is owned by the coop (that's how coops work) and the mortgage is for the shares in the coop. So maybe more complex than a basic foreclosure where it might possibly work more like you'd think.
I think the broader point is if real estate is selling well below what is you would expect, there's a reason for that.
Over the weekend, I pulled some data from my website to find the cheapest homes you can buy from the US federal government. The outliers (a $3,000 house in Flint, MI) are often in quite a state of disrepair, but there are lots of...lots...which are in reasonable condition across many US states.
I'm guessing since the map is price limited there are likely many more properties out west except they are higher priced? $800 for a small chunk of vacant land behind something industrial near what looks like a lonely highway exit somewhere inland California. Then the East half has lots of reasonable looking homes. I hope the people left behind and homeless are getting by.
The crazy thing about residential property in 21st-century USA is that it's always a money pit.
A few hundred years ago, it was commonplace for the middle- and upper-classes to own large estates, and these estates were expected to be assets that earn money. You would hire staff, and tenant farmers, or have slaves or whatever cadres of workers to work the land, be shepherds, and basically produce revenue for the lords or owners of the estates. This was not only a UK phenomenon but continued in the USA.
Unfortunately, in modern times, there are zoning laws, business licensing, insurance, and many things to militate against homeowners using their homes as businesses or assets or generators of revenue. You can't exactly have a public entrance and signage in a HOA neighborhood and your neighbors gonna be pissed if random stranger-customers are pulling up in their cars all day and walking up to your front door to buy merchandise or to use a service that you offer from your private residence.
But nevertheless, this commercialization happens all the time. I didn't realize how crazy widespread it is until I started paying attention in Google Maps. There are dozens of "cottage industries" in every neighborhood. It's probably exactly the reason why "McMansions" and excessively large homes are popular, even as fertility shrinks and people aren't having kids, they still want room at home for their entrepreneurship and home office, doing whatever business they go into for themselves.
I have seen little family farms that sell "raw milk" and mutton and fresh eggs, basically on the DL for your Venmo or Cashapp payments. Across the valley there is literally an arms dealer who sells out of his garage, and only a few blocks from a school. There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.
So yeah, a home that your family lives in, that's in a residential-zoned area, of the United States, that's guaranteed to have "negative value" because you'll always be pouring money into its taxes, upkeep, and maintenance. And that's exactly why most homeowners decide to actually start a business and use that property, in a grey area, to earn money rather than throwing it all away.
> little family farms that sell "raw milk" and mutton and fresh eggs, basically on the DL
There's a decent amount of that going on in my neighborhood (Dallas TX). The reason it's on the DL is because nothing is pasteurized let alone inspected by the local health department. Some people prefer raw milk as being more natural but pasteurization was invented for a reason. I stay away from it.
The real truth is that "cream-top" or non-homogenized milk is way, way better and may not be as harmful to our health, and cream-top milk is perfectly legitimate, legal, and sold by ordinary farmer's markets in my area.
Pasteurization is a very necessary process if any community expects to transport and distribute milk past a radius where a teenage girl could carry a pail, basically. I see nothing wrong with pasteurized milk and I also avoid "raw milk" because it's a red herring of a fad, and those who defiantly purchase and consume raw milk are reckless and ignorant people.
But if you've never sampled cream-top milk, then you've not lived. It is absolutely a revelation. I love opening up a glass bottle of milk from Straus Family Creamery and then using a fork to dislodge the thick cap of cream in the neck of the bottle. You can dredge it all out and then use it in your coffee or tea later. I just enjoy when it melts in my mouth.
Of course, cream-top milk is rather "chunky" and can be unsightly: homogenization was developed partly to mollify housewives and make milk more conveniently pourable from a bottle. In fact, the homogenization processes today remove all the milkfat and then that cream can either be used in creamery products, or the cream can be added back in later to satisfy a target percentage, like 1% or 2% as milk is most commonly sold.
Fat in milk and other foods contributes to the satiety factor: you can eat rice-cakes or soybeans all day and not feel full, until you put some butter or oil on them, and then you feel satisfied. If I drink skim milk then I've got some hydration, but I don't enjoy it. If I drink/chew on a glass of cream-top milk, then I've been transported very near to Cowherds Heaven, and I feel extremely satisfied with the investment.
The USDA and FDA and powers that be told us that milkfat is bad for us because they were commercially motivated to say so. Milkfat is the most lovely part of milk but also the most versatile, and can be used in many nutritious ways, and that's why dairy farmers want rank-and-file consumers to demand less milkfat and drink 1% milk, so that the more lucrative milkfats and cream can be siphoned off for use in more profitable products.
> There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.
Isn't this just taking the perspective of the HOA? Mixed use zoning is a completely reasonable policy. The status quo shouldn't be used for normative determinations. At which point you have busybody HOAs lobbying for restrictive residence-only zoning and then harassing sympathetic small business owners who are just trying to make a living.
An HOA is, by definition, your ordinary neighbors. And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes.
It is really about conformity and keeping the peace, so that the Clark Griswolds and Gladys Kravitzes of the world cannot run roughshod over the others.
Mixed-use zoning is perfectly cromulent, but I am not referring to mixed-usedl zoning. These are large SFH residences with ample lots in suburban developments.
This sort of entrepreneurship is fine if you’re a web designer, or traveling electrician, but many times they instead flout all kinds of boundaries such as carrying the proper business licenses, parking/disabled accessibility, insurance, signage etc.
Americans in suburban and residential areas have a certain expectation that their neighborhoods should be free of obvious commercial enterprises, because that is why we invented strip malls!
> And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes.
The trouble here is that the principle of subsidiarity doesn't lead to the HOA making these decisions from both ends.
For many of them the HOA isn't local enough and the decision should be up to the individual property owners, e.g. they should have nothing to say about you putting solar panels on your roof or operating a business that isn't meaningfully disruptive to the neighbors.
For the others, the rules have regional/national implications for things like housing affordability and small business viability and the HOA is subject to perverse incentives. Each suburb wants a different one to host the strip mall, with the result that there is an insufficiency of land zoned for dense construction and mixed use, and then it requires a higher level of government to act because too many of the local ones refuse to allow any at all.
There's so much wrong with this comment. First, middle class _by definition_ did not have large estates that earned incomes for them.
Second, it's weird to throw in an "unfortunately" after pointing out that the only thing that enabled this was exploitative labor practices (including slavery!)
Third, most homeowners do not actually start a business and use their property to earn money.
Fourth, the home doesn't have a negative value. It has a resale value often quite substantial, and you are living in it while you're paying all those maintainence costs.
I watched the show Bridgerton, and I was shocked when the main characters just dilly-dallied all day. Turns out they had estates that made money for them.
Real estate specifically is very hard to "value" sight unseen from a bidding perspective. The post I shared - with the information on what to look out for as well as possible additional costs - is part of helping people to understand what to bid.
To 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.
Love the last one. I'm reminded of an article I read yesterday, where the author complains about how all the affordable housing was built in low income areas! "Oh no! They built the affordable housing where the people who need it are at!! NOOO!"
A 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.
The prices shown are worthless, you’d have to check what debt any property actually has to determine what you need to put down. That $3k flint house, you will pay $200k+ when all is said and done.
The low prices are nothing more than an interesting hook.
they aggregate and display information exactly as provided by the various databases, and then make it clear what has been included and what hasn't been included in that price. there is nothing misleading.
it's a real stretch to call that clickbait, even starting from the already-stretched definition of clickbait common on HN.
On the contrary, this is a great starting point for OP to enhance the app to crawl (if needed) to determine fully loaded costs required to acquire. Liens and other encumbrances are typically public record, demo costs can be estimate by zip code if you don't want to programmatically reach out to demo vendors for a quote.
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 range instead of the bottom lends a lot of credibility to my mind.
I do not feel pain for builders anymore. Most of these projects are just AI prompted outputs. We can criticize much more sharply, as the effort spent is lower.
> You can buy a house from the government for $3,000
With $120,000 owed in back taxes due by you upon purchase. Also the structure is derelict and will have to be destroyed before anything can be done with it.
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.
in 2012 I had a chance to buy a duplex in a relatively desirable neighborhood for $25k. It needed about $25k in rehab, but $50k in that area was unheard of.
My (now ex) wife was against buying it because we had not bought a home for ourselves yet, and even trying to explain that we could buy it, live in one side, rent the other for the full cost of the mortgage and then some was not enough to convince her, so I let it slide as no amount of money was worth the never-ending argument that it would have caused.
That duplex is worth about $450k now, and if I had gone through with it it would have generated a conservative $200k in rent income in the meantime.
If I had known the relationship would have been over in less than 5 years from that point, I probably would have bought it anyway, but at the time my mentality was "happy wife, happy life", naively thinking that there was a way to make someone happy who refused to be happy.
> ... I probably would have bought it anyway ...
Maybe the restoration would have been a (or another) point of friction, and perhaps the project would not have gone well because of it. You could have sold for breakeven, or less. Then you (and/or she) would have blamed that as the reason things went south.
Or it could have gone well and you could have lost your share in a divorce.
I don't really have a point ... maybe, bygones and all ...
A wise man once told me that most relationships can survive two affairs or one house remodel.
> Or it could have gone well and you could have lost your share in a divorce.
The Duplex: the perfect property for divorce settlements!
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?
check south florida
The best deals are always in shithole places /s
There was an episode of Fixer Upper where Chip and Joanna helped their carpenter buy a house for 15K. The neighborhood was dystopian. Presumably people were using the house for shooting practice as its one side was entirely bullet riddled.
Depends. I know people who got property from the city's sort of "land bank" operation for $1. No they did not have to pay any back taxes on it even though that is how the city got it from the original owners. The city even destroyed the old structure, backfilled it, and maintained the lot with regular mowing before it traded hands. Seems the city was desperate to just hand it over to someone to get it off their books really.
> 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.
https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/title-contingency
As an aside, I'm told that Title companies make absolute bank. Most buyers get title insurance, but the insurer very rarely ever has to make a payment.
> Most buyers get title insurance,
This is because all lenders require title insurance as a requirement for receiving the loan monies. So for almost all buyers they have no choice, their bank/credit union that is actually putting up most of the money forces it upon them.
Not all buyers are using loans. First house I sold was to someone who refused title insurance because in his words, "that house has been sold 3 times in 10 years, the title's fine."
I swear I heard this same story elsewhere online. Maybe it was here in another thread.
> In practice, maybe some roofer/plumber/landscaper forgot to do that and now you have a problem you didn't know you had
Seems to me like this should be the contractor's problem. If they did the job 2 weeks ago fine, but if they come along 6+ months later after the house is sold demanding payment from the new owner that seems ridiculous to me. Surely if these Liens are supposed to be public there needs to be a requirement that they are registered as soon as possible.
Otherwise it seems to me like this is a ripe opportunity for scams. Buy house, have contractors refurbish it, sell it for a much higher value, then the contractors register their debts and now the new buyers or their insurance is on the hook for the refurbishment.
> Otherwise it seems to me like this is a ripe opportunity for scams. Buy house, have contractors refurbish it, sell it for a much higher value, then the contractors register their debts and now the new buyers or their insurance is on the hook for the refurbishment.
This is called ‘fraud’, it is already illegal.
Mechanic’s liens are good and necessary for customers like the current US President who fail to pay their contractors.
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 wherever it should be reported, and once that's all in order they can start working on the vehicle.
If they try to register their lien once the owner of the vehicle has changed, it can not be accepted. You can't secure debt with a vehicle you no longer own. The lender needs to make sure the person owns the car and register the debt while they still own the car. And if they sell the car then they have money to pay the debt, and since they no longer own the car then their debt is no longer secured so that should trigger a requirement to pay the debt per the loan contract. Debt should be owned by people not objects.
The whole concept of debt that's attached to objects is silly. It can make sense in certain situations like a housing association that's taking up a shared loan and paying it down as part of shared monthly expenses, but for a car repair or similar it makes no sense. The person who takes the debt is responsible for the debt. If they sell the car then they pay the debt with the money from the sale, if the sale doesn't cover the debt then they still owe the rest.
It does not need to be any more complicated than this. In order for anyone to take over responsibility for debt in relation to a purchase, there needs to be explicit written and signed consent. So - I can buy a house including some debt if I know and agree to it, but I can't unwittingly buy a landmine. If the owner fails to resolve their debts when they sell that should be their problem not the buyer's. It's up to the bank to collect their debts from the person they have a contract with.
> 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 judgment results in a lien on the property." We actually went under contract on a house where the owner's name matched someone in bankruptcy and triggered this. We knew the guys were different (ages, addresses) but our mortgage lender needed the title company to figure out their mistake first. So the lien attaching to a house that sells in the meantime is a really extraordinary circumstance: closings usually take 30 days so what are the odds that something gets filed in that meantime without already being underway? If the lien does attach to the house, then the buyer would have a tort against the seller for putting them on the hook, but the mechanic would have a backstop for getting paid in the form of the lien. The buyer could get a judgment against the seller. But that'll all be handled by the title insurance if it ever comes to that.
> The person who takes the debt is responsible for the debt. If they sell the car then they pay the debt with the money from the sale, if the sale doesn't cover the debt then they still owe the rest.
This is how it really works in practice. The mortgage company won't let you buy the house with the liens still attached. The debts will get paid out of the purchase price of the house. Who gets paid what out of the sale price is already determined before the actual closing date, and the mortgage company writes separate checks to everyone who needs to get paid (I think). The insurance is there in case something very out of the ordinary happens. Even the cost of paying someone to figure out who gets what is part of that insurance policy (again, I think).
> If the owner fails to resolve their debts when they sell that should be their problem not the buyer's.
It effectively is. The title search before the closing reveals all of this and pauses the sales process. Nothing proceeds until they come up with a plan to pay it off. The insurance is only for extraordinary circumstances where someone messed up the recording of the lien.
> 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.
This would be the best. I'd love it if it were federal so you just had to search one thing. Bankruptcy is federal, so why not this? Even better: if the system could record the house going under contract. You're a roofer who's been lazy suing somebody. Every Monday you upload the CSV of addresses that owe you money. One of those days, you see "this house is now under contract and you have 5 days until the window to register lawsuits against the sellers closes" You call your lawyer and tell them to start the lawsuit for the unpaid debt. Sellers and buyers get notified that the title isn't clear and there's a suit worth $X to work out.
This then produces the problem of people monitoring every address in their town and threatening the parties to the sale with a baseless lawsuit in order to pause the sale. You may have to bring back corporal punishment to stop such individuals. Hmm. Much to consider.
Very commonly in the U.S. are liabilities that "run with the land", not the owner. This is done intentionally.
Easements can be a huge headache too e.g. some utility may have an easement to come on your property at any time and do a whole list of activities to maintain a pipeline, or power line, or what have you.
yeah I had a neighbor spend a lot of time and money planting flowers only to have the city destroy all of it when it was time for new utilities heh. You need to know about easements.
I find mineral rights interesting. You can own some land, say 20 acres, and then discover something valuable under it like oil but then it turns out the rights to that oil are owned by someone else. Further the owner of those mineral rights can drill on the surface of the land, which you own, without your permission.
> Further the owner of those mineral rights can drill on the surface of the land, which you own, without your permission.
The oligarchs always win.
It varies by state and sometimes even county. Sometimes you buy the property outright (a deed), sometimes you buy the debt (a lien), so the original owner pays you back with interest but they keep the property unless you foreclose, and sometimes you buy the right to the land if the original owner doesn't pay you back within a set time frame. (a redemption deed)
Here's a general map of how it works, by state: https://www.secretsoftaxlieninvesting.com/tax-sale-map
In general, when it's sold as a deed, and sometimes as a redemption deed, non-government liens on the property are forfeit, and it clears out the taxes owed by the government entity selling it, but it doesn't clear out other government liens, e.g. when a property is sold to pay county property tax, the federal government could have a lien on it for income tax owed by the same owner, and the county could have a lien on it for sidewalk repair, and a mortgage company could have a lien for a loan. The mortgage company would be unable to collect anything, the federal tax lien would likely allow the government to force you to sell it to them for what you paid for it, but they wouldn't be entitled to collect from you, because it's the previous owner who pays taxes, but you could still be required to pay the county lien for sidewalk, plus penalties accrued since the previous owners non payment started, because you now own that property and its sidewalk.
It’s called a tax sale. The delinquent tax was assessed on the value of the ”improved property”.
Oh and its filled with asbestos, so you're gonna be on the hook for that too.
Yes, you are basically just buying the land underneath.
not quiet true - if you wanna use the land - you'd have to pay to destroy the house already built on top of it.
and sometimes you can not do that. if it is some sort of historical thing.
or filled with asbestos.
Even if there’s no tax or other liens, demolishing a house probably costs $10-20k, my guess is that the $3000 minus $15,000 would equal the rough cost of an empty lot in the same area, $12k.
123,000 is still very cheap
Did you look at the $3000 house? https://govauctions.app/auction/hud-home-420-e-dayton-st-fli...
It needs to be torn down and rebuilt. It's not a large plot. It doesn't seem to be in an attractive location. For all we know the water is undrinkable. I suspect its true value is negative.
Heh, some landowner near me owned a piece of contaminated property. Technically worthless but was getting some lease money for a shop on the property. I think their game plan was for the city to grow and it being valuable to excavate one day for a condo or other building. Soil remediation is a lot cheaper when you dig anyway.
Transit agency tried to expropriate for a train station at market value: ie $0.
Looks like it got settled out of court: https://canliiconnects.org/en/commentaries/88178
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.
Yes and for that I can get something much nicer in a non derelict area. Probably a much better plot too if I go rural.
Not if the thing is actually worth $3000
I do not understand what sane person attaches taxes to a property instead of to a person.
Local governments that very much want to get their tax monies, even if receiving them is delayed by a few years before someone buys the property.
Yeah, "almost certainly needs serious work" in that first home was doing some serious heavy lifting - the roof has collapsed and the foundation has sunk.
$123,000 still not terrible if the home is worth 5 time that.
It's hard to actually use this map and inspect individual homes. Clicking into a listing replaces the map view, so you lose the context of where you were looking, and the way the dots animate in make it harder to visually remember where you were. And you can't zoom in further to distinguish multiple overlapping properties.
Yes, sorry, the map UI could be better. You can zoom in to the state level, which hopefully will help a little with not losing context.
You still go back to the complete map when you navigate back out of a listing, so it doesn't really help much. The state-level zoom helps a little but it's not enough to distinguish markers in the same city, for example.
Looks like they deliberately broke the browser's "Open in new tab" function, which could have solved this problem.
Also please don't break the back button
I'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.
Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here". I know lots of people optimistic that remote work would upend this, but even the few still-fully-remote workers I know need to live in areas where they or their family can find non-remote jobs if ever necessary.
It's not even just wanting jobs for family; it's wanting to be around services that I think people don't always consider. Sure, you could plan on doing everything yourself if that's truly your hobby, but most remote workers will want to be able to call a plumber or an electrician when something goes wrong, and even finding tradesmen in those locations can sometimes be challenging.
The clawing back of remote jobs is pretty astounding. More places are 3 days a week I guess. But the idea of living out in the country with no one around, but with your remote job is nearly fantasy. You have to be very sure that if push comes to shove, you won't ever be laid off, fired, company closes, etc.
> You have to be very sure that if push comes to shove, you won't ever be laid off, fired, company closes, etc
I’ve been remote-only since 2017. In that time I’ve had interruptions in employment three times - it’s not nearly as bleak as this makes it sound.
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.
Now let's say the price collapses by 50%. You're stuck and can't sell in a "frozen" housing market... like how the housing market has been since May 2022. And the problem is structural. And it's only going to get worse as interest rates continue to rise to battle inflation. Here's a nice explainer.
https://youtu.be/qROG2uXPChY?t=608
The assumption for a couple of generations has been that housing costs will always increase over time as a percent of wages. The problem with that is that it's unsustainable. The next generation has to be able to afford it in order to buy it, and they also need to buy food and utilities etc., which also cost more when real estate does. Investors can't save you either when the next generation can't afford the rent they would have to charge to turn a profit.
But in order for housing to be a good investment, it has to have competitive returns with other investments, i.e. it needs to increase by at least as much as GDP per capita. Meanwhile median wages have been increasing slower than GDP per capita, which as above is the long-term cap on housing prices. In other words, housing can't long-term sustainably beat other market investments unless wages do, which they haven't, in which case people would get better returns by putting their money in stocks etc.
Worse, years of ZIRP inflated housing prices beyond any sustainable level even with the scarcity being maintained by existing zoning restrictions, i.e. the "eventually it's not sustainable" point is already in the past.
The result is that in order for housing to be a good investment going forward from now, there would first have to be a major housing crash so that "investors" (i.e. home buyers) could buy low instead of buying high. Which thereby implies that it wouldn't be a good long-term investment at current prices. And by major housing crash, notice what "enormous housing bubble that crashed the world economy" looks like on this chart in 2007 and compare it to what things look like since then, especially since 2020:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
A lot of people haven't realized that the party is over and are expecting housing to still be a good investment.
Nothing you said is wrong, but you could say that in 2013 too, and in that time apparently prices have nearly doubled and you missed out if you didn't take advantage.
Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.
> Nothing you said is wrong, but you could say that in 2013 too, and in that time apparently prices have nearly doubled and you missed out if you didn't take advantage.
In 2013 you couldn't say that prices have nearly doubled since 2013 under ZIRP, which is the argument that buying now would be buying high.
> Mortgages are "heads I win, tails you lose" in non-recourse states like California. You're not down more than your down payment, but the upside is huge, and for the past fifty years it has been more financially advantageous to use that leverage to buy the most expensive home they will allow you to.
You're not down more than your down payment plus whatever principal and interest you've paid since then.
On top of that, it's still leverage. Suppose you buy a $1M house with a $200k down payment and ~$5000/mo going to principal and interest. In five years you've paid out the $200k down payment, another ~$50k in principal and ~$250k in interest. If the value at that point declines by 25% since you bought, you're not down 25%, you're wiped out, -$500k, because you're left with a $750k house where you still owe $750k having already paid $500k. Let's say it's only -$380k because you'd have had to pay $2000/month to rent a smaller apartment in the alternative.
Whereas if you put the $380k into non-leveraged investments and the market declined by 25%, you'd still have $285k instead of $0. If the overall market does better than housing or it was "safe" investments like CDs then you'd still have the entire $380k plus whatever interest it earned. Worse yet, if housing costs declined then your monthly rent would go down but your mortgage is fixed for 30 years.
You could still make the argument that it's worth it to take the leverage if the upside is expected to be large, i.e. you expect the value to keep going up, but suppose you don't.
> In 2013 you couldn't say that prices have nearly doubled since 2013 under ZIRP, which is the argument that buying now would be buying high.
But in 2013 you could say they've nearly doubled since 1998 under ZIRP, and then everything you say applies.
It's also an option on continuing to live in your same COL but a different city, with a nice large house. Worse case, prices fall enough you can afford a new mortgage even if your investment is wiped out. Worst case of renting is you can never buy because houses appreciate faster than you can save. You said
> then you'd still have the entire $380k plus whatever interest it earned.
And it's not enough to buy a house if prices continue up, and you've lived in a cheap (so probably small and undesirable) apartment for years while your friends are building up their household.
> But in 2013 you could say they've nearly doubled since 1998 under ZIRP, and then everything you say applies.
The problematic number is the home price to median household income ratio:
https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-inco...
In 1998 it was ~4 having been stable in the 4 to ~4.5 range since the late 1970s. By 2013 it was ~5, from being five years into ZIRP. The peak in the housing crisis bubble was 6.8. Right now it's ~7.
> Worse case, prices fall enough you can afford a new mortgage even if your investment is wiped out.
Where are you getting another down payment having been wiped out? The original down payment was $200k. It only takes a 25% decline to wipe you out and even at the lower price you'd need another $150k to get a new mortgage. And just after a crash would be the time to buy, but that's when you'd have just been zeroed out.
You might be better off to keep the existing house even if you're slightly underwater on it, at least then you don't need to sink another down payment, but then you're stuck continuing to pay the mortgage for a million dollar house when it's only worth $750k.
And there is also a third option. Suppose the prices don't move significantly up or down for a while. Then the leverage neither wipes you out nor gives you leveraged returns, but it means you're paying the interest on that $800k loan while getting no return from it.
> Worst case of renting is you can never buy because houses appreciate faster than you can save.
Which is precisely the problem with buying if that's the thing that actually happens to other people. If prospective buyers can't afford to buy your house for the high price anymore then you can't sell it for the high price anymore, so the next thing that happens is that the price comes down.
> And it's not enough to buy a house if prices continue up, and you've lived in a cheap (so probably small and undesirable) apartment for years while your friends are building up their household.
Which is again predicated on the prices continuing to go up. How high can the home price to income ratio get before something gives?
I was thinking the same thing 10 years ago, but people are still buying houses, the stock market keeps going up. It doesn't make sense. But I lost a lot of money not being more heavily invested and buying a house I could easily afford. I also feel like we're a zombie economy that doesn't know it's dead yet, but all I know is somehow I'm going to be screwed and I won't see it coming.
That's the bank's problem.
> You have to be very sure that if push comes to shove, you won't ever be laid off, fired, company closes, etc.
There are plenty of remote first employers. And that's not going to change now.
If there are no good doctors, dentists, schools, stores, and so in within reasonable distance then life kind of sucks even if you aren't concerned about money/other jobs.
If those things are within a reasonable distance, then so are jobs (well, as about as much as "normal" at least).
Also, IME, places with no employers tend to be populated primarily by addicts, disability fraudsters, and other criminals.
...or the elderly, retired, legitimately disabled, or just people temporarily down on their luck.
I get what you're saying and I see that how my comment could be interpreted. I wish I had worded it better.
The most vibrant places in the world (again, IME) have a diversity of abilities, backgrounds, ages, and economic status.
There's another type of place - the sort of place I had in mind - that doesn't. That attracts people who are trying to get away from law and any sort of social contract. Some of those places look attractive on the surface. That's the sort of place I'm talking about. They're probably not as common as they seem to be to me.
Neither of which tends to lend itself to an interesting place to live.
> Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here".
also likely very underdeveloped infra
I think something important to consider as well is quality of basic services. I've been permanently remote since 2015, and I've moved three times since then. But as a remote worker, I spend most my time in my home and that means it needs high quality water, high quality air, high quality internet, and high quality electrical services. If I cannot get all of these, it's a non-starter. I have absolutely zero faith in getting all of these services of sufficiently high quality for the majority of homes listed on this site, and in many cases I would expect /none/ of these services to be sufficiently high quality. Most of these houses are located in places I would never live, they are essentially negative value locations (in very real terms, not just monetarily).
All that said, I live in one of the lowest cost of living major metros in the US, and I bought a house in an acceptably decent neighborhood w/ high quality water, electrical, and air, and 5 gigabit symmetric fiber service for under $300k. You don't need to spend millions to find an acceptable place to live when you work remotely, but that doesn't mean you want to live in a HUD foreclosure in some of the worst most blighted neighborhoods in the country where you can't rely on even basic services and are going to be immediately a target of violent crime.
Peter Santenello does a great job of this.
OP, your site makes for nice reading, but that quantity-sorted list of states to filter by is kind of maddening to work with. Alphabetical recommended :)
A 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.
Years ago when I was thinking of moving, I started looking at houses with my real estate agent. I started asking about foreclosure sales and he said the same thing. Seller and seller's agent will try and obfuscate the numbers to make it look attractive and essentially "stick" the buyer with something that costs way more than its worth.
It's crazy how this isn't simple. Surely all they have to do is to tally up the debts secured by the apartment, then sell the apartment and use the money to pay as much of the debts as possible. Any remaining debt is the lender's loss, that's the risk they take when giving out loans.
If any debt does need to be tied to the apartment rather than the person, then it simply needs to be registered in a publicly (easily) accessible way. If someone fails to register their debt in a timely manner then it should be forfeit. It should be registered at the time it takes effect. Lender should be responsible for making sure the registration is complete before giving out the debt, if someone takes out a loan then sells it before the debt has been registered that's the lender's problem. They can't retroactively add a lien to my property because the previous owner took a loan when it was their property. That's not reasonable. If the lien is not registered then it doesn't exist, it should be that simple.
I feel like any statement with "surely all they have to do" is going to miss some nuance.
In this particular case the apartment is owned by the coop (that's how coops work) and the mortgage is for the shares in the coop. So maybe more complex than a basic foreclosure where it might possibly work more like you'd think.
I think the broader point is if real estate is selling well below what is you would expect, there's a reason for that.
Well, yes, I have in fact always dreamed of owning an abandoned house in Flint, MI
Over the weekend, I pulled some data from my website to find the cheapest homes you can buy from the US federal government. The outliers (a $3,000 house in Flint, MI) are often in quite a state of disrepair, but there are lots of...lots...which are in reasonable condition across many US states.
Why go to all this trouble? Just go to realtor.com (no relationship) and enter your desired parameters thusly: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Oakland_CA...
Do you pull data from non-HUD sources too?
https://www.realestatesales.gov/
The data are from HUD, Fannie Mae HomePath, and Freddie Mac HomeSteps. There's a methodology section towards the bottom of the page.
I'm guessing since the map is price limited there are likely many more properties out west except they are higher priced? $800 for a small chunk of vacant land behind something industrial near what looks like a lonely highway exit somewhere inland California. Then the East half has lots of reasonable looking homes. I hope the people left behind and homeless are getting by.
Correct, there are about 3,000 real estate listings right now on the main site: https://govauctions.app/feed?category=real-estate
How does this work?
I hover the mouse over a dot and a pop-up appears nearby, but when move the mouse away from the dot to click the bubble, the bubble closes.
Apologies, clicking on the dot should also take you to the listing.
Haha, not a single dot in my state. Guess I'm moving to Illinois!
Edit: "Time Left NaNm", guess I should be quick.
Thanks for this. Tip jar?
Appreciate it, but no need - happy you found it interesting. If you end up buying one of these, let me know!
AKA where not to buy a home.
The crazy thing about residential property in 21st-century USA is that it's always a money pit.
A few hundred years ago, it was commonplace for the middle- and upper-classes to own large estates, and these estates were expected to be assets that earn money. You would hire staff, and tenant farmers, or have slaves or whatever cadres of workers to work the land, be shepherds, and basically produce revenue for the lords or owners of the estates. This was not only a UK phenomenon but continued in the USA.
Unfortunately, in modern times, there are zoning laws, business licensing, insurance, and many things to militate against homeowners using their homes as businesses or assets or generators of revenue. You can't exactly have a public entrance and signage in a HOA neighborhood and your neighbors gonna be pissed if random stranger-customers are pulling up in their cars all day and walking up to your front door to buy merchandise or to use a service that you offer from your private residence.
But nevertheless, this commercialization happens all the time. I didn't realize how crazy widespread it is until I started paying attention in Google Maps. There are dozens of "cottage industries" in every neighborhood. It's probably exactly the reason why "McMansions" and excessively large homes are popular, even as fertility shrinks and people aren't having kids, they still want room at home for their entrepreneurship and home office, doing whatever business they go into for themselves.
I have seen little family farms that sell "raw milk" and mutton and fresh eggs, basically on the DL for your Venmo or Cashapp payments. Across the valley there is literally an arms dealer who sells out of his garage, and only a few blocks from a school. There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.
So yeah, a home that your family lives in, that's in a residential-zoned area, of the United States, that's guaranteed to have "negative value" because you'll always be pouring money into its taxes, upkeep, and maintenance. And that's exactly why most homeowners decide to actually start a business and use that property, in a grey area, to earn money rather than throwing it all away.
> little family farms that sell "raw milk" and mutton and fresh eggs, basically on the DL
There's a decent amount of that going on in my neighborhood (Dallas TX). The reason it's on the DL is because nothing is pasteurized let alone inspected by the local health department. Some people prefer raw milk as being more natural but pasteurization was invented for a reason. I stay away from it.
The real truth is that "cream-top" or non-homogenized milk is way, way better and may not be as harmful to our health, and cream-top milk is perfectly legitimate, legal, and sold by ordinary farmer's markets in my area.
Pasteurization is a very necessary process if any community expects to transport and distribute milk past a radius where a teenage girl could carry a pail, basically. I see nothing wrong with pasteurized milk and I also avoid "raw milk" because it's a red herring of a fad, and those who defiantly purchase and consume raw milk are reckless and ignorant people.
But if you've never sampled cream-top milk, then you've not lived. It is absolutely a revelation. I love opening up a glass bottle of milk from Straus Family Creamery and then using a fork to dislodge the thick cap of cream in the neck of the bottle. You can dredge it all out and then use it in your coffee or tea later. I just enjoy when it melts in my mouth.
Of course, cream-top milk is rather "chunky" and can be unsightly: homogenization was developed partly to mollify housewives and make milk more conveniently pourable from a bottle. In fact, the homogenization processes today remove all the milkfat and then that cream can either be used in creamery products, or the cream can be added back in later to satisfy a target percentage, like 1% or 2% as milk is most commonly sold.
Fat in milk and other foods contributes to the satiety factor: you can eat rice-cakes or soybeans all day and not feel full, until you put some butter or oil on them, and then you feel satisfied. If I drink skim milk then I've got some hydration, but I don't enjoy it. If I drink/chew on a glass of cream-top milk, then I've been transported very near to Cowherds Heaven, and I feel extremely satisfied with the investment.
The USDA and FDA and powers that be told us that milkfat is bad for us because they were commercially motivated to say so. Milkfat is the most lovely part of milk but also the most versatile, and can be used in many nutritious ways, and that's why dairy farmers want rank-and-file consumers to demand less milkfat and drink 1% milk, so that the more lucrative milkfats and cream can be siphoned off for use in more profitable products.
> There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.
Isn't this just taking the perspective of the HOA? Mixed use zoning is a completely reasonable policy. The status quo shouldn't be used for normative determinations. At which point you have busybody HOAs lobbying for restrictive residence-only zoning and then harassing sympathetic small business owners who are just trying to make a living.
An HOA is, by definition, your ordinary neighbors. And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes.
It is really about conformity and keeping the peace, so that the Clark Griswolds and Gladys Kravitzes of the world cannot run roughshod over the others.
Mixed-use zoning is perfectly cromulent, but I am not referring to mixed-usedl zoning. These are large SFH residences with ample lots in suburban developments.
This sort of entrepreneurship is fine if you’re a web designer, or traveling electrician, but many times they instead flout all kinds of boundaries such as carrying the proper business licenses, parking/disabled accessibility, insurance, signage etc.
Americans in suburban and residential areas have a certain expectation that their neighborhoods should be free of obvious commercial enterprises, because that is why we invented strip malls!
> And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes.
The trouble here is that the principle of subsidiarity doesn't lead to the HOA making these decisions from both ends.
For many of them the HOA isn't local enough and the decision should be up to the individual property owners, e.g. they should have nothing to say about you putting solar panels on your roof or operating a business that isn't meaningfully disruptive to the neighbors.
For the others, the rules have regional/national implications for things like housing affordability and small business viability and the HOA is subject to perverse incentives. Each suburb wants a different one to host the strip mall, with the result that there is an insufficiency of land zoned for dense construction and mixed use, and then it requires a higher level of government to act because too many of the local ones refuse to allow any at all.
There's so much wrong with this comment. First, middle class _by definition_ did not have large estates that earned incomes for them.
Second, it's weird to throw in an "unfortunately" after pointing out that the only thing that enabled this was exploitative labor practices (including slavery!)
Third, most homeowners do not actually start a business and use their property to earn money.
Fourth, the home doesn't have a negative value. It has a resale value often quite substantial, and you are living in it while you're paying all those maintainence costs.
I watched the show Bridgerton, and I was shocked when the main characters just dilly-dallied all day. Turns out they had estates that made money for them.
Then you watch Downton Abbey and learn that upkeep on a hundreds years old castle on that estate will bury you.
Tempting if looking to build a new workshop or garage. Tear it down, and build from scratch.
> Search all government auctions in one place, *know what they're worth before you bid*
So the blog post contradicts the entire premise of the site.
This is just an ad for their valuation service.
Real estate specifically is very hard to "value" sight unseen from a bidding perspective. The post I shared - with the information on what to look out for as well as possible additional costs - is part of helping people to understand what to bid.
To 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.
Let us count the excuses in the thread:
>back taxes
>asbestos
>shit hole places
>something wrong with it
>needs work
>jobs
>demand better of yourself
Love the last one. I'm reminded of an article I read yesterday, where the author complains about how all the affordable housing was built in low income areas! "Oh no! They built the affordable housing where the people who need it are at!! NOOO!"
https://citylimits.org/where-the-most-affordable-apartments-...
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A 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.
>As it stands, it’s clickbait.
check the big "What you need to know before you buy" section.
Yes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t clickbait.
The prices shown are worthless, you’d have to check what debt any property actually has to determine what you need to put down. That $3k flint house, you will pay $200k+ when all is said and done.
The low prices are nothing more than an interesting hook.
Where are you finding the lien on that property? I don't see it listed at all.
Edit: I'm asking how you came up with the $200k+ figure
they aggregate and display information exactly as provided by the various databases, and then make it clear what has been included and what hasn't been included in that price. there is nothing misleading.
it's a real stretch to call that clickbait, even starting from the already-stretched definition of clickbait common on HN.
On the contrary, this is a great starting point for OP to enhance the app to crawl (if needed) to determine fully loaded costs required to acquire. Liens and other encumbrances are typically public record, demo costs can be estimate by zip code if you don't want to programmatically reach out to demo vendors for a quote.
I’m not sure this is clickbait in a literal sense, but given the factors you point out, it could promote misunderstandings among casual readers.
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 range instead of the bottom lends a lot of credibility to my mind.
I do not feel pain for builders anymore. Most of these projects are just AI prompted outputs. We can criticize much more sharply, as the effort spent is lower.