Need advice for making an offer on property not on the market

[Steven Wi]

I have a 1.7 acre lot tucked away in this hidden section in my county. Across from me in an abandoned lot with a mobile home on it. That lot is abandoned. No one has gone to or from it since I bought mine in 2015. There are saplings growing though the chain on the fence and all around the trailer.

I am spending about 10k on rent annually. The lot and trailer are worth about 25k. The guy paid 19,500 according to public records. So if I got it for 25k I could live out of it making it way easier to work on my current lot and save gas money and time getting to and from it. But the big one is I would save 10k next year. Meaning I could save around 20k total. Putting me 3k under where I am now. Plus I'll get a raise in Jan. And factor in this year isn't over. I save around 1k a month so I have around $7000 coming my way.

I have 43k in savings alone. I could pay 25k in cash and make about 20k back next year. But at the same time I don't want to be out 25 thousand dollars all at once. But this is an abandoned mobile home. The odds of a mortgage are slim.

Assume the guy ends up being interested in selling. Let's just pretend he is for right now so we can weigh options.

First, what's the best play? Look around and see if someone would be willing to do a mortgage? I'd love to get one through USAA because my payments would be about $140 a month for 15 years and I could pay off way early after I'm not spending on rent. I mean I could seriously have it paid off anywhere from 2 - 5 years. Or should I just pay about 20k in cash and see what loan rates I can get for the rest? Or should I just bite the bullet and pay the 25k out right? What's my best move?

Secondly, I found a phone number and current address for the guy. No idea how accurate it is. Should I just call him and see if he'd be willing to sell and what he would want for it? I'm not going to tell him I have the adjoining lot. What should I know before calling him? Obviously I'll want to ask him if I can walk around the property and hopefully see the trailer at some point. (I know it's kind of shady, but I did that already. There's a busted window. I'm kind of wanting to leverage that for less money if he gets greedy. I was out on my property and came back up and the fence stops at a certain point so I stood in the edge of the tree line and just gave the trailer a once over a while back to gauge how long it had been abandoned based off of the overgrowth.)

How do I find out about back taxes and liens? When I bought my lot the realty firm used a third party to handle the legal aspect of everything. Obviously I'd want them to mediate this to draw it up and make it legal. Could they find out about liens and things like that?

Any advice on getting this guy to sell and negotiating tactics? How can i find out about liens and back taxes? When negotiating I'll want to deduct those costs obviously. or should I deduct more from the offer than just what is owed for some unforeseen expense?

Thanks.