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.

> 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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here".

also likely very underdeveloped infra

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.

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.