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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm, this is where I’ve spent four years trying to buy a starter (2BR/2BA) home in on a single income. The biggest problem in older markets is that most housing stock is of appalling quality, requiring another five to six figures of work to get into a modern, habitable shape - unless you do the work yourself, which most can’t while they also hold down a FTE gig and deal with the return of urban commuting.

It’s bad.

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A lot of lower-end housing spends some years in the hands of people who can’t afford to keep up maintenance, and/or are too old to keep up with it well (… or to keep up with cleaning). As a result, it’s all but ruined by the time someone else gets a crack at it.

Yep, and a lifetime spent moving every few years (and my obsession for details and desire to understand how everything works) means that I can see the chasm between what properties are actually worth versus what folks are asking for. I’ve seen some really pricey nightmares these past several years ($650k for a 1400sqft home with knob-and-tube electrical wiring and an honest-to-god fire bucket in the basement next to the oil heater!), and I cannot afford to take such extreme risks on the most expensive purchase I’ll likely ever make in my life.

It sucks.

People get pissy about flippers but there is some scary stuff out there I don't think anyone really wants to deal with

A lot of flippers aren't dealing with scary stuff like foundations or structure, that's risky and expensive. It's cheap to throw up some new drywall and vinyl floors to make it look renovated though.

We developed nicknames for bad flip jobs after viewing so many:

“Spray Foam Specials” - gobs of sprayfoam insulation and a fresh coat of paint.

“Gap Properties” - because who needs floorboards to actually meet?

“Skatepark Schemes” - for when the floors are so bowed you can do lip tricks at the room edges

“Flashpoint Fixers” - surface-level flip jobs that kept the knob-and-tube wiring alongside newer Romex

“Oil Derricks” - any home with an oil tank on a foundation of compacted earth or otherwise lacking a groundwater barrier

I wish I could set up a filter in Zillow that automatically excluded homes that have gray engineered flooring, which flippers seem to love for some reason.

I sympathize and was in the same situation albeit a much easier market in hindsight. I came to Bay Area in 1999 and after finally facing the reality of the market after a couple of years, bit the bullet and bought something. The prices were/are so outrageous compared to my former residence in Austin the sticker shock and hyper competitive real estate market at the low end - every SFH I could comfortably afford was going to require significant amount of work to make palatable to someone who did not want the inside aesthetic of the 1950-1970s and still each had multiple bids, with cash bids above asking with no inspection always winning, I imagine this has only gotten worse at entry level with the elevation in total compensation for certain fields.

Find a run-down structure not surrounded by derelicts on land that's otherwise favorable. 1 wall remodel. A modest structure costs roughly around $250k if built by someone else, vaguely divide that in half if DIY.

Your target price range is set too low for the area if you keep seeing poor quality houses. I've heard plenty of people complain about the quality of the housing stock in my (old) area, but that's because they insist on lowballing in desirable neighborhoods, there's plenty of well-maintained properties as well including at the low end. You just can't expect a miracle for the price of a foreclosure.

yeah for some reason there seems to be a pricing disconnect on many homes, the discount on home that needs a lot of work seems to be less than the current cost to fix it (especially when taking into account labor shortages and tariffs on materials)

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