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cheap houses in columbus, oh

If you search on realtor.com, there are many cheap houses around the country. NYC and San Francisco are still expensive, but it's amazing how cheap other cities are.

I searched on realtor.com for Columbus, OH and found 287 houses below $20,000.

Not $200,000. Just $20,000.

Here's a house for $5,000.

http://snipurl.com/3wr8u [www_realtor_com]

Many other places too including House swapping brokering... Hotsheets...

Thanks for mentioning cheap houses Galore... $5,000 ($24 per month) almost affordable on my allowance... :)

Eventually, with some Smart thinking and planning it all gets better...

Real estate in general usually tends to go in 5 yr segments... So in 2013ish... Cheap houses Galore today could be worth a nice little fortune... ;)
http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate...-Opportunities

Not the usual House swapping where people exchange their homes for vacations...

Brainstorm current and Up and coming real estate predictions and...

Create your own Trend and ideas in Real Estate by take Advantage of the many Money making niche
possibilities...

Just get innovative and Do the Unusual...

House swapping a growing niche in real estate market
"I'll buy your house if you'll buy mine" is the latest real estate marketing tactic...
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle...aU7EaDiaMDCiUT

Lots more interesting real estate possibilities throughout...

Steve Gillman's excellent resource... Great affordable information & ideas...
http://www.housesunderfiftythousand.com/

Phil

Houses selling for just... $1 !!?!?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered (Post 22426)

Here's a house for $5,000.

http://snipurl.com/3wr8u [www_realtor_com]

Here's an article I stumbled upon a little while ago... (It took me a little while to find it again to post it!)

Foreclosure fallout: Houses go for a $1
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll...8130360/&imw=Y

Quote:

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Foreclosure fallout: Houses go for a $1
Ron French / The Detroit News

DETROIT -- One dollar can get you a large soda at McDonald's, a used VHS movie at 7-Eleven or a house in Detroit.

The fact that a home on the city's east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America's poorest big cities.

And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.

The sale price of the home may be an anomaly, but illustrates both the depths of the foreclosure crisis in Detroit and the rapid scuttling of vacant homes in some of the city's impoverished neighborhoods.

The home, at 8111 Traverse Street, a few blocks from Detroit City Airport, was the nicest house on the block when it sold for $65,000 in November 2006, said neighbor Carl Upshaw. But the home was foreclosed last summer, and it wasn't long until "the vultures closed in," Upshaw said. "The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else."

The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby.

Scrappers tore out the copper plumbing, the furnace and the light fixtures, taking everything of value, including the kitchen sink.

"It about doesn't make sense to put the family out," Upshaw said. "Once people are gone, you're gonna lose the house in this neighborhood."

Tuesday, the home was wide open. Doors leading into the kitchen and the basement were missing, and the front windows had been smashed. Weeds grew chest-high, and charred remains marked a spot where the garage recently burned.

Put on the market in January for $1,100, the house had no lookers other than the squatters who sometimes stayed there at night. Facing $4,000 in back taxes and a large unpaid water bill, the bank that owned the property lowered the price to $1.

$1 sale to cost bank $10,000

While it's not unusual for $1 to be exchanged when property is transferred for legal reasons, listing a home in the Multiple Listing Service for $1 was surprising and unsettling to Kent Colpaert, the listing real estate agent for the property.

"I've never seen a home listed for $1," Colpaert said.

"But it's been hit hard: It's just a shell."

On Tuesday, Realtor.com listed one other single-family home, one duplex and one empty lot at $1 in Detroit.

Dollar property sales are the financial hangover from the foreclosure crisis, said Anthony Viola of Realty Corp. of America in Cleveland.

Lenders that made loans to unqualified buyers during the height of the subprime market now find themselves the owners of whole neighborhoods of vacant, deteriorating homes.

"No one has much sympathy for these banks that made subprime loans," Viola said. "And in some cities like Cleveland, judges aren't letting them sit on the properties -- they're ordering them to tear them down or sell them."

So desperate was the bank owner of 8111 Traverse Street to unload the property that it agreed to pay $2,500 in sales commission and another $1,000 bonus for closing the $1 sale; the bank also will pay $500 of the buyer's closing costs. Throw in back taxes and a water bill, and unloading the house will cost the bank about $10,000.

"It doesn't make sense in some neighborhoods to keep paying costs and costs," Colpaert said. "It can make more financial sense to give it away."

Buyer calls it an investment

Colpaert declined to provide the name of the prospective purchaser, because the deal had not been through closing. The agent did say that the buyer agreed to pay the full list price of $1, and planned to pay cash.

The buyer, a local woman, considers the home to be an investment property and will not live there, Colpaert said, though exactly how soon the buyer can expect to recoup her four-quarter investment is questionable. Replacing the guts of the house will costs tens of thousands of dollars, and the owner will have trouble keeping scrappers from stealing the improvements as quickly as they're installed. Home demolition costs about $5,000, Colpaert said.

Meanwhile, the new owner will owe $3,900 in property taxes in 2009 on her dollar purchase unless she challenges the tax assessment.

While selling a home for the amount of change most people could find between their couch cushions is unusual, some abandoned homes in Detroit sell for $100; vacant lots can be purchased for $300.

"My 14-year-old son could buy a block of Detroit property," said Ann Laciura, senior servicing specialist for the Bearing Group.

Re: Houses selling for just... $1 !!?!?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dien Rice (Post 22435)

Here's another more recent article on this phenomenon...

As Phil has pointed out, there could be an opportunity here, for those who have or who can get the cash to fix these places up...

American Dream Fades
http://blogs.abc.net.au/dispatches/2...can-dream.html

Quote:

26/09/2008 (Translation: This is the British way of writing dates - they put the day first. So it's 26 Sept., 2008.)

American Dream Fades
By Kim Landers

In "Motor City" Detroit, houses are cheaper than cars.

In fact there are some homes that are cheaper than most things in America; cheaper than a fast food hamburger, cheaper than milk, cheaper than a loaf of bread.

That's because there are some homes in this city selling for just one dollar.

They're among the thousands of homes that have been foreclosed.

Ninety per cent of the approximately 10,000 homes on the market in Detroit have been foreclosed.

There almost 1,700 of these houses on the market in Detroit for less than $10,000. And among them are the homes going for just $1.

Real estate agent Kim Williams tells me that investors are buying these homes at rock bottom prices, doing them up and renting them out. But it'd be a brave investor who'd take on some of these properties.

We step through the front door of one and the smell of urine hits me. This house has been vacant and on the market for almost a year. People have broken in and stripped almost everything out of it. The kitchen cupboards are gone, so too are all the sinks, the plumbing, the hot water system, the furnace and some of the windows. The toilet remains. Not that it's working.

This home is in a tree-lined street in a good neighbourhood. It's what real estate agents call a three-bedroom bungalow. Kim Williams says once it would've sold for about $70,000. Now it's on the market for just under $7,000. She estimates an investor would have to spend about $10,000 fixing it up and then could probably rent it out for about $700 a month.

A short drive away we stop at the house selling for $1. It's in appalling condition. It too has been broken into. Someone has stolen the water metre. Kim Williams tells me it would've been sold for scrap metal. The problem is that when the vandals ripped out the water metre, they broke the pipes and water is now flooding the house. Rubbish floats through the rooms.

Up until yesterday an investor had been going to buy this place for $1. But when he saw the flooding he decided not to go ahead. He was prepared to fix up the house, but the flooding could be affecting the foundations and that's just too much trouble to deal with. He can find another cheap property in Detroit.

Detroit is a city that's been hit hard by the housing foreclosure crisis. But neither it nor the state of Michigan top the list of the worst places for foreclosures anymore. The contagion has now spread to other states like Nevada and California.

In his address to the nation this week, President George W Bush acknowledged that the housing turmoil is the root cause behind America's current economic instability. He's warned that America's "entire economy is in danger" unless the US Congress approves an unprecedented rescue package to allow the Government to buy up the bad assets of shaky financial firms in a bid to keep them from going under.

There's no doubt America's economy is facing an enormous challenge. And for some people here in Detroit who've lost their homes, the door to the American Dream has been closed for now.

Re: Houses selling for just... $1 !!?!?

Dien,

Thanks for bringing up Detroit. They've definitely been having their problems lately, with the whole automobile industry etc.

Talking about opportunities, where there's Negative news and interested media, there's some very good Keyword opportunities and trends to watch out for too...

Bet there's a bunch of missed marketplaces online for Detroit consumers... Many are unemployed but may just be looking for things like business ideas etc. etc...

Interesting on how International media's follow particular news and it just happens to be Australian media... :)

Detroit has almost 1700 homes on the market for less than $10000. Kim Williams has been a real estate agent in Detroit for ten years. ...
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2374937.htm

Another Quick example on spotting trends and opportunities...

Mark Bower ran into a problem - 10 years ago the internet had no information...

But as most know Fresh new ideas are just waiting to be Found and developed into real businesses even today!

From Mark's about us...
Over 10 years ago when I started Aberdeen Home Repair, I turned to the internet looking for additional advice on how to repair mobile homes. Well, I ran into one problem – 10 years ago the internet had no information! You also couldn’t find any current books on mobile home repair. So I changed all that by creating mobilehomerepair.com and then wrote a popular repair manual. Mobilehomerepair.com is now the worlds most visited site by consumers trying to repair their manufactured home.
http://www.mobilehomerepair.com/
http://www.mobilehomerepair.com/phpbb/index.php

Surprisingly, there's Good money to be made in a real estate niche that most prefer to stay away from for a variety of reasons. Usually because you don't own the land and have to continually pay monthly pad fees but further reading and bumping into Mark and a few others offers some interesting investment opportunities and ideas to think about... ;)
http://mobilehome.com/
http://mfdhousing.com/phorum5/index.php
http://mfdhousing.com/portal/stories.php3?nid=6711

Phil

eBay: Woman buys house she hasn't seen for $1.75

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/techdigest/...s-e870a33.html

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By Gary Cutlack Tech Digest - Thursday, October 2 11:22 am

No, that is not an error. We didn't mean $1.75m. We really do mean $1.75, as in about 90p at today's rapidly-plummeting exchange rate. Less eBay fees and PayPal commission, of course, but they won't be that crippling considering the buyer's getting an entire house.

The woman in question is mature student Joanne Smith. She was browsing eBay for "PlayStations," when she noticed an alert for a house on sale with no starting price. So she placed a bid of $20 - eventually winning the auction for $1.75 and proudly getting on Rung Z of the property ladder.

Her new wooden pre-fab is in Saginaw, Michigan, a part of America particularly badly hit by repossessions thanks to the US housing crash. It has also been condemned. And there's quite a lot of tax owing on it. And Joanne says she's never been there and has no intention of living in it - although she might sell it for a profit when the housing crisis dies down a bit.

So, on reflection, she is not really an eBay Nutcase - she could be the next Donald Trump. This could DOUBLE in value over the next five years, leaving her with enough profit to get a coffee.

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