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

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.

> 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

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.

It’s called a tax sale. The delinquent tax was assessed on the value of the ”improved property”.

not always true or even the norm, I checked 3 near me and they are decent neighborhoods

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.

not quiet true - if you wanna use the land - you'd have to pay to destroy the house already built on top of it.

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.

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.

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

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.

Also please don't break the back button

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Then you watch Downton Abbey and learn that upkeep on a hundreds years old castle on that estate will bury you.

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.

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.