[throwaway0a5e]

If after a decade of reading about $500 houses in Detroit people haven't figured out what "cost of compliance" means then they probably never will at this point.

When you read the words "$<small_number> house" the words you should read in your mind are "dilapidated building in a municipality with crazy back-tax scheme that would make the California RMV proud and probably also regulatory capture by relevant trade(s) that inflates the cost of repairing the building"

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

You wanna know how much a house costs look at the average income of the working households in the neighborhood. What they can afford is about what it costs.

[bryanlarsen]

Or maybe "$<small_number> house" just means somewhere no one wants to live. You can get a reasonable house in rural Saskatchewan without any fine print for under USD$20K.

https://www.point2homes.com/CA/Cheap-Homes-For-Sale/SK.html?...

[alkonaut]

Yeah I mean for $1 I expect a shed without running water but I expect most of the cheapness to be due to high fixed costs and low demand, e.g. because of a non-existent job market.

Now that tons of people with good tech jobs can work from almost anywhere, I expect some of these remote locations to become quite poopular. I wouldn't mind spending summers in a shed in a remote part of Italy, for example.

[ProZsolt]

The problem these small towns rarely have adequate internet for remote work. I hope this will change with Starlink.

[alkonaut]

4G is more than enough for what I need (I'm going to assume now that anywhere at all populated in these countries already have decent 4G or will have within the foreseeable future). This is the case already in e.g. Northern rural Sweden. It's far far less densely populated than anywhere in Italy.

[Scoundreller]

> I wouldn't mind spending summers in a shed in a remote part of Italy

Just make sure it has A/C unless you're in the mountains.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I'd buy it right now if it came with a free Canadian citizenship.

[Scoundreller]

Saskatchewan has one of the more accessible immigration schemes: https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/moving-to-saskatchewan...

Best part is you won't even need to lie about wanting to stay in Sask!

Once you're in the country for 3 years, you can apply for citizenship. I think they take a year to process, but you'll get it if you were here long enough and didn't do anything stupid.

[imtringued]

You get what you pay for.

Less extreme example: When people sell their house 30% below market rate then you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that you have to spend that saved 30% on remodeling the home. Cheap properties usually have problems but estimating how much it costs to fix them is difficult if you are not the owner. However, the owner knows that it would take X amount of money to repair the home so he deducts X from the market price to clear the sale.

When you're saving 99% expect to replace up to 99% of the house.

The only real way to save money is by doing the repairs/remodeling yourself but that's basically a second job.

[Aeolun]

If you get a bunch of land for basically free and have to build a new house that’s still great though.

[corty]

Yeah, but you won't. Conservation laws will prevent you from tearing down the old house and instead oblige you to invest to prevent it from falling over on its own.

[literallycancer]

It's Southern Europe. Ask the locals how often they wait for the bureau to allow repairs and how often they just go ahead and do whatever changes they feel are needed.

[taejo]

Be sure to ask the locals how often they get away with that vs. how often foreigners get away with it (especially foreigners who've paid a 5000-euro deposit and explicitly promised not to do it, in exchange for a 1-euro purchase price)

[icebraining]

Uh, no, that's a good way to get fined, at least in Portugal/Spain.

People will often circumvent rules when they can (e.g. add a second story without a permit, but avoid putting regular windows to claim it's just a storage attic), but if you want to make more profound changes, you better be prepared to fight the bureaucracy.