Home Buyer Articles & Advice

We Bought A House For $17,500

My wife Ana and I found cheap homes for sale all over during a seven-week cross-country trip, and we even bought one in a pretty little town in the mountains of western Montana. We paid $17,500, spent almost $2000 to fix it up the way we liked it, and lived there for several months before selling it for $28,000. You can see a photo of our little pink house on the homepage of our site www.HousesUnderFiftyThousand.com. This wasn't a fluke. There really are great towns where you can still find cheap homes for sale.

In Anaconda, Montana you can fish for trout, go to a three-dollar-movie in a beautiful old art-deco theatre (named the 5th most beautiful theater in the U.S., according to the Smithsonian), drop some nickles in a slot machine (a dozen casinos), eat at a fine restaurant, stop by the bar for a dollar beer, and buy a house for less than $30,000 - all within a four block area! There are good schools and churches, a library with fast internet service, and wildlife (including bears and mountain goats) a few hundred yards from downtown.

The reason there are so many cheap homes for sale in Butte and Anaconda, is simple. There aren't many good jobs left. I personally found jobs in Anaconda easily-but not good ones. People left the area in the 80's especially, after the mines and smelters closed. This exodus has left one-in-seven "housing units" in Anaconda vacant, according to the 2000 U.S. census. This has driven down the prices of houses dramatically. Since both towns still have all the basic ammenities, are cleaner now, and are recovering, they are great places to retire to, or to move to if you have an internet or other non-location-based business.

The economic situation is the primary reason you can buy a cheap house in many parts of the country. These are towns that have seen troubled times, but are often recovering, and with good reasons. Anaconda, an example we know well, now has a ski resort, a Jack Nicholas golf course, and beautiful scenery. The houses cost four times as much if you go an hour in any direction, and those higher prices are will reach Anaconda eventually.

On the other hand, there are towns like that one in South Dakota where we stopped for lunch. The bulletin board had ads for cheap homes for sale, placed there by desperate home-sellers, each trying not to be the last to leave town. There was a photo of a beautiful old five-bedroom farmhouse for $11,000. We looked up the deserted street as we ate, and noticed that most of the buildings were boarded-up. This town was (is) clearly dying, and didn't have anything to help revive it. Inexpensive homes are easy to find here, but I wouldn't take one for free.

Maybe paradise is too much to expect, but there are many wonderful towns, from Florida to Oregon, where there are cheap homes for sale. So what does a town need in addition to inexpensive houses in order to make our list? Well, the criteria are certainly subjective, but include at least the following:

1. Population between 4,000 and 80,000.

2. A good library.

3. A good grocery store.

4. A movie theatre.

5. Cheap houses: at least six for sale under $50,000.

6. The town "feels" good.

When we researched and built our website, we broke the towns up into two pages. One is for the towns with houses for sale for less than $50,000. The other is for the towns with really cheap homes for sale - under $30,000! Yes, they are still out there. Using a phone and the internet, searching for your affordable dream home is easier than ever.

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