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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

I'm building instead of buying. Unless you are dead set on a particular neighborhood it makes no financial sense to buy anymore. You can build a brand new 300k house on a 100k lot and have a 500k home with positive equity the moment you close.

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No offense, but if there's a 100k lot, it's because noone wants to live there.

No offense, a statement like that (and the OP) without factoring in location means nothing. There are definitely 100k lots in places people want to live, some of them are pretty big. While everyone may not want to live there, there will be plenty of buyers.

Exactly this. A 100k lot in PA is a vastly different thing than a 100k lot in NYC.

Every housing thread seems to be people wanting to discuss their locality first, anecdotes second, and then a diceroll for the rest.

The Essential Craftsman spec house recently sold for $610k.

According to the public history the undeveloped lot looks to have cost 40k in 2017.

Does this qualify as a place nobody wants to live? Last I checked the PNW was a nice place.

https://www.trulia.com/p/or/roseburg/3044-nw-daysha-dr-roseb...

I was referring to undeveloped lots as per the comment I was replying to. At that price, it would have already been developed.

Most cheap undeveloped land that is for sale has some issue with it (unbuildable, access, wetlands, flooding, one or more utilities unavailable, nuisances - noise, terrain, etc).

FYI- the linked property has the land assessed at 133k. It's not purchasable as a 100k lot if there is a house on it.

Edit - doing more research the "Essential Craftsman" house is on Farm/Forest zoned land. It may have been recently rezoned to build residential on.

Two economists are walking down the street and one of them notices what appears to be a $20 bill on the sidewalk. “It’s not a real $20 bill,” the other economist declares. “If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already.”

Unless it's prefab house(aka modular home), it's gonna take you at least 6 month from the signing the contract of getting a lot to the house fully built. Labor market have been really heating up too - most of the builders are focusing building $1MM+ homes in premium districts definitely not worth their time to build a $300k home when they can build a million dollar home. If you are building the home yourself, good luck it's gonna take longer even if you are not working full time and can build house full time.

>Unless it's prefab house(aka modular home), it's gonna take you at least 6 month from the signing the contract of getting a lot to the house fully built.

Fully aware it's going to be a 1yr+ long process. But after going through the housing market gauntlet and flat out refusing to do the insane stuff it takes to even get an offer accepted now (waived everything, 10%+ earnest money, etc., etc.) I couldn't care less about the wait.

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