A House for a Buck - In America?

Houses for a dollar? Real houses made of bricks and wood? A house with a roof? With real property underneath? In the United States? Not a current where the per capita is a couple hundred dollars? Can it be true that houses selling for less than $1000 in the once great city of Detroit? Prices for properties between $1 and $1,000 do not seem possible anywhere in the United States in 2009. Our reaction to this video from CBS News titled Buy A Home For A Dollar was disbelief. Take a look -


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Shocking! In 2009 properties, real properties, for one dollar? Could this be true? Not in the motor city? So we took a stroll over to Realtor.com and found 187 houses in Detroit listed under $1000! With 4 of those listed for only $1! Yes that is $1.00!!!

Sure most are boarded up. And it looks like almost all are bank owned. And who knows what the neighborhood and the properties look like now if lenders can not dump them for any real amount of money. But that is still 187 properties with domiciles for sale today, February 25, 2009, for less than $1000 in a major city in United States of America!

Motor city is hurting, severely. Lets hope the old adage "as GM goes, so goes the nation" is no longer true. For if it is, we fear, we are definitely in midst of Depression 2.0 after hearing this story...

Note - We were already contacted by a fellow Garden Stater interested in our opinion about buying up some of these properties and and becoming a landlord. We can not endorse buying sight unseen properties over the internet. We then questioned about whether they knew about rent and tenant laws for Detroit - the answer was no. We also questioned who was responsible for back taxes - this easily can turn out to be the new owner. So while it may be exciting to pick up cheap properties, there could still be disaster ahead. We have already lived through this once - office workers with no experience in real estate issues becoming landlords and speculators on properties half a country away. It did not work out well during the bubble and we would be shocked if it worked now, even for a buck a property. Remember another old adage - "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is."