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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
check the big "What you need to know before you buy" section.
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.
Edit: I'm asking how you came up with the $200k+ figure
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.
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.
There are plenty of remote first employers. And that's not going to change now.
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.
it's a real stretch to call that clickbait, even starting from the already-stretched definition of clickbait common on HN.
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.
Your podunk home went up $50k.
HCOL home went up $500k.
Better deal would be to hold the expensive house.
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.
If those things are within a reasonable distance, then so are jobs (well, as about as much as "normal" at least).
also likely very underdeveloped infra
player_piano•1h ago