Cheap Property for Sale - Examples and Ideas

I picked up a real estate guide for Pueblo Colorado recently, to look at cheap property for sale in the area (we live thirty minutes from Pueblo and this is being written in the fall of 2009). I was encouraged to see that there were "sections" devoted to houses in different price ranges. Even more encouraging was the fact that homes over $100,000 didn't start until Section Four.

Section one said this: $9,000 to $30,000 - 45 homes. Not bad, even if they are mostly fixer uppers. Section Two covered houses priced from $30,000 to $70,000, and the cover noted that there were 276 homes listed in this price range. Altogether there were over 500 houses for sale for under $100,000. This is one of the more affordable places to live in Colorado.

As for investing, there are opportunities for anyone willing to do a little work. The ads for many of the homes under $40,000 claimed to have new carpeting, paint or kitchens. It didn't seem that there was a lot left to fix on some of them, and at that price even the relatively low rents in Pueblo would provide positive cash flow.

Cheap Property for Sale - Other Pages

We have had this web site up since 2004, and it originated in the experience of my wife and I traveling the country in 2002 - 2003 looking at affordable places to live. Many of the examples we first put on the site were no longer so affordable by the top of the boom years around 2006. In fact, our own $17,500 home in beautiful Anaconda, Montana (photo on the homepage) would like have sold for $80,000 by then (we sold it for $28,000 five months after buying it).

Some pages had to be updated periodically as prices changed, of course. We expanded the focus to homes under $100,000 rather than just under $50,000, and added pages with examples of towns where those homes were available. Recently I have had to update those pages again to reflect the lower prices that are once again available thanks to the real estate slump of the past few years. Here are some of the pages you might find interesting:

Anaconda, Montana. - This has our own story from 2002 - the inspiration for this website.

Where To Find Cheap Homes - Towns with houses under fifty thousand dollars.

Cheap Houses: More Places - Homes for less than $30,000.

The Most Affordable Places to Live - Originally a page devoted to towns with homes under $125,000, this has had to be updated because some of these same towns now have much cheaper houses.

Canon City Real Estate - A bit about our own town.

Cheap Property for Sale - Other Considerations

There are a lot of thing to consider when looking for cheap real estate. If you are investing in rentals, for example, you need to know not only whether you can find cheap units, but whether there is sufficient rental demand to keep them full and rental rates high enough to provide positive cash flow. If houses don;t work, consider mobile homes on property. They often rent for nearly what a small house gets while costing less than half as much.

If you are looking for land to hold for a while, you have to consider the property tax rates where you are looking. Property taxes are very low in this part of Colorado, for example (around Canon City), so it costs very little to sit on a piece of land for a long time. In other areas most of any gains you get can be eaten up by the taxes paid each year.

If you are buying a home for yourself, you have to look at all the costs of owning it. Only then can you fairly compare it to other homes and other areas. Here in Canon City, for example, we pay about $550 annually on a home worth $150,000. Where we used to live in Traverse City, Michigan the same home would have property taxes of about $3,000 each year. Look too at the cost of utilities and insurance for various houses, as well as commuting costs if you are considering getting a cheaper home by living further from work.

There is a lot of cheap property out there at the moment. Homes, raw land, lots, apartment buildings, vacation homes, condos, commercial property and more - they all have dropped in price in most parts of the country. Consider this a once in a lifetime 30%-off real estate sale.