6 ms·

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

107 points by player_piano 3mo ago

player_piano 3mo ago
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.
cliglot 3mo ago
[dead]
- fhdkweig 3mo ago
  Yes, you are basically just buying the land underneath.
  - dwa3592 3mo ago
    not quiet true - if you wanna use the land - you'd have to pay to destroy the house already built on top of it.
    - sumtechguy 3mo ago
      and sometimes you can not do that. if it is some sort of historical thing.
      - chasd00 3mo ago
        or filled with asbestos.
- FireBeyond 3mo ago
  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.
- BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
  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.
  - malshe 3mo ago
    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.
  - BorisMelnik 3mo ago
    not always true or even the norm, I checked 3 near me and they are decent neighborhoods
    - Waterluvian 3mo ago
      I’m curious about this but don’t want to dox you. Any guidance on how to find comparable examples?
      - BorisMelnik 3mo ago
        check south florida
- NitpickLawyer 3mo ago
  > 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?
  - dcrazy 3mo ago
    It’s called a tax sale. The delinquent tax was assessed on the value of the ”improved property”.
  - 1-more 3mo ago
    > 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 https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/title-contingency
- someguynamedq 3mo ago
  123,000 is still very cheap
  - furyofantares 3mo ago
    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.
  - beng-nl 3mo ago
    Not if the thing is actually worth $3000
  - advisedwang 3mo ago
    Did you look at the $3000 house? https://govauctions.app/auction/hud-home-420-e-dayton-st-flint-mi-48505-michigan-hud-262-154638 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.
    - Scoundreller 3mo ago
      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 https://canliiconnects.org/en/commentaries/88178
- burningChrome 3mo ago
  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.
  - BizarroLand 3mo ago
    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.
    - jagged-chisel 3mo ago
      > ... 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 ...
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  $123,000 still not terrible if the home is worth 5 time that.
- mmmlinux 3mo ago
  Oh and its filled with asbestos, so you're gonna be on the hook for that too.
- Aeolun 3mo ago
  I do not understand what sane person attaches taxes to a property instead of to a person.
  - pwg 3mo ago
    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.
    - Aeolun 3mo ago
      Yeah, so you attach it to a person, and then you don’t have to wait at all.
- quickthrowman 3mo ago
  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.
- asdff 3mo ago
  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.
toomuchtodo 3mo ago
Thanks for this. Tip jar?
- player_piano 3mo ago
  Appreciate it, but no need - happy you found it interesting. If you end up buying one of these, let me know!
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
deadbabe 3mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  >As it stands, it’s clickbait. check the big "What you need to know before you buy" section.
  - deadbabe 3mo ago
    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.
    - jancsika 3mo ago
      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
    - toomuchtodo 3mo ago
      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.
    - john_strinlai 3mo ago
      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.
bobmcnamara 3mo ago
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.
- player_piano 3mo ago
  Apologies, clicking on the dot should also take you to the listing.
DarkContinent 3mo ago
Do you pull data from non-HUD sources too? https://www.realestatesales.gov/ https://www.realestatesales.gov/
- player_piano 3mo ago
  The data are from HUD, Fannie Mae HomePath, and Freddie Mac HomeSteps. There's a methodology section towards the bottom of the page.
forinti 3mo ago
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.
- xvedejas 3mo ago
  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.
  - gensym 3mo ago
    Also, IME, places with no employers tend to be populated primarily by addicts, disability fraudsters, and other criminals.
    - ryandrake 3mo ago
      ...or the elderly, retired, legitimately disabled, or just people temporarily down on their luck.
      - brewdad 3mo ago
        Neither of which tends to lend itself to an interesting place to live.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      - gensym 3mo ago
        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.
pimlottc 3mo ago
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.
- player_piano 3mo ago
  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.
  - pimlottc 3mo ago
    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.
    - ryandrake 3mo ago
      Looks like they deliberately broke the browser's "Open in new tab" function, which could have solved this problem.
  - intrasight 3mo ago
    Also please don't break the back button
hizyyo 3mo ago
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airstrike 3mo ago
Well, yes, I have in fact always dreamed of owning an abandoned house in Flint, MI
xyzelement 3mo ago
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.
- burningChrome 3mo ago
  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.
- sfn42 3mo ago
  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.
  - xyzelement 3mo ago
    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.
bellowsgulch 3mo ago
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.
skyberrys 3mo ago
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.
- player_piano 3mo ago
  Correct, there are about 3,000 real estate listings right now on the main site: https://govauctions.app/feed?category=real-estate https://govauctions.app/feed?category=real-estate
cliglot 3mo ago
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mlmonkey 3mo ago
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/type-single-family-home/beds-2/baths-2/hoa-no,known/price-2-10000?view=map&qdm=true&pos=64.944653,-135.334518,15.354221,-62.197093,5 https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Oakland_CA...
gowld 3mo ago
> 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.
- player_piano 3mo ago
  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.
nodesocket 3mo ago
Tempting if looking to build a new workshop or garage. Tear it down, and build from scratch.
ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
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.
- brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
  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.
panny 3mo ago
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-were-built-last-year-and-what-else-happened-this-week-in-housing/ https://citylimits.org/where-the-most-affordable-apartments-...
snypher 3mo ago
Haha, not a single dot in my state. Guess I'm moving to Illinois! Edit: "Time Left NaNm", guess I should be quick.
IAmGraydon 3mo ago
AKA where not to buy a home.
altairprime 3mo ago
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 :)

107 points by player_piano 3mo ago

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.

cliglot 3mo ago

[dead]

fhdkweig 3mo ago
Yes, you are basically just buying the land underneath.
- dwa3592 3mo ago
  not quiet true - if you wanna use the land - you'd have to pay to destroy the house already built on top of it.
  - sumtechguy 3mo ago
    and sometimes you can not do that. if it is some sort of historical thing.
    - chasd00 3mo ago
      or filled with asbestos.
FireBeyond 3mo ago
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.
BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
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.
- malshe 3mo ago
  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.
- BorisMelnik 3mo ago
  not always true or even the norm, I checked 3 near me and they are decent neighborhoods
  - Waterluvian 3mo ago
    I’m curious about this but don’t want to dox you. Any guidance on how to find comparable examples?
    - BorisMelnik 3mo ago
      check south florida
NitpickLawyer 3mo ago
> 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?
- dcrazy 3mo ago
  It’s called a tax sale. The delinquent tax was assessed on the value of the ”improved property”.
- 1-more 3mo ago
  > 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 https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/title-contingency
someguynamedq 3mo ago
123,000 is still very cheap
- furyofantares 3mo ago
  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.
- beng-nl 3mo ago
  Not if the thing is actually worth $3000
- advisedwang 3mo ago
  Did you look at the $3000 house? https://govauctions.app/auction/hud-home-420-e-dayton-st-flint-mi-48505-michigan-hud-262-154638 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.
  - Scoundreller 3mo ago
    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 https://canliiconnects.org/en/commentaries/88178
burningChrome 3mo ago
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.
- BizarroLand 3mo ago
  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.
  - jagged-chisel 3mo ago
    > ... 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 ...
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
$123,000 still not terrible if the home is worth 5 time that.
mmmlinux 3mo ago
Oh and its filled with asbestos, so you're gonna be on the hook for that too.
Aeolun 3mo ago
I do not understand what sane person attaches taxes to a property instead of to a person.
- pwg 3mo ago
  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.
  - Aeolun 3mo ago
    Yeah, so you attach it to a person, and then you don’t have to wait at all.
quickthrowman 3mo ago
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.
asdff 3mo ago
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.

toomuchtodo 3mo ago

Thanks for this. Tip jar?

player_piano 3mo ago
Appreciate it, but no need - happy you found it interesting. If you end up buying one of these, let me know!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

deadbabe 3mo ago

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.

john_strinlai 3mo ago
>As it stands, it’s clickbait. check the big "What you need to know before you buy" section.
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  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.
  - jancsika 3mo ago
    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
  - toomuchtodo 3mo ago
    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.
  - john_strinlai 3mo ago
    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.

bobmcnamara 3mo ago

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.

player_piano 3mo ago
Apologies, clicking on the dot should also take you to the listing.

DarkContinent 3mo ago

Do you pull data from non-HUD sources too? https://www.realestatesales.gov/ https://www.realestatesales.gov/

player_piano 3mo ago
The data are from HUD, Fannie Mae HomePath, and Freddie Mac HomeSteps. There's a methodology section towards the bottom of the page.

forinti 3mo ago

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.

xvedejas 3mo ago
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.
- gensym 3mo ago
  Also, IME, places with no employers tend to be populated primarily by addicts, disability fraudsters, and other criminals.
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    ...or the elderly, retired, legitimately disabled, or just people temporarily down on their luck.
    - brewdad 3mo ago
      Neither of which tends to lend itself to an interesting place to live.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - gensym 3mo ago
      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.

pimlottc 3mo ago

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.

player_piano 3mo ago
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.
- pimlottc 3mo ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    Looks like they deliberately broke the browser's "Open in new tab" function, which could have solved this problem.
- intrasight 3mo ago
  Also please don't break the back button

hizyyo 3mo ago

[dead]

airstrike 3mo ago

Well, yes, I have in fact always dreamed of owning an abandoned house in Flint, MI

xyzelement 3mo ago

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.

burningChrome 3mo ago
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.
sfn42 3mo ago
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.
- xyzelement 3mo ago
  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.

bellowsgulch 3mo ago

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.

skyberrys 3mo ago

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.

player_piano 3mo ago
Correct, there are about 3,000 real estate listings right now on the main site: https://govauctions.app/feed?category=real-estate https://govauctions.app/feed?category=real-estate

cliglot 3mo ago

[dead]

mlmonkey 3mo ago

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/type-single-family-home/beds-2/baths-2/hoa-no,known/price-2-10000?view=map&qdm=true&pos=64.944653,-135.334518,15.354221,-62.197093,5 https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Oakland_CA...

gowld 3mo ago

> 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.

player_piano 3mo ago
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.

nodesocket 3mo ago

Tempting if looking to build a new workshop or garage. Tear it down, and build from scratch.

ButlerianJihad 3mo ago

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.

brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
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.

panny 3mo ago

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-were-built-last-year-and-what-else-happened-this-week-in-housing/ https://citylimits.org/where-the-most-affordable-apartments-...

snypher 3mo ago

Haha, not a single dot in my state. Guess I'm moving to Illinois! Edit: "Time Left NaNm", guess I should be quick.

IAmGraydon 3mo ago

AKA where not to buy a home.

altairprime 3mo ago

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 :)