Looking into purchasing my first foreclosure property

[Sam Wright]

Hey All,

Like the title says, I am looking into purchasing my first forclosure property and I am just looking for some advice. Here is my thought process:

So I am one of those people who is afraid we are heading for a recession and I have been converting my assets to cash in order to purchase a property when prices go down. Recently I have been scanning auction.com to kind of get the lay of the land and I found a house in my hometown that is listed with a starting bid of about an eighth what I’d expect it to be worth. It is a 1000 square-foot single family home in a slightly below average neighborhood. Then I did a search of its address and found a zillow add from a few months ago with pictures of the inside that show the place to be completely trashed. Last weekend I was in the area and I decided to drive by and it looks about as bad as the pictures. At the price its listed at I could afford to bid up around 40k, put about 100k into remodeling the property, and close to double my investment . I grew up doing projects with my dad and worked construction in the summers during college, I figure I could do some of the basic work to drive down the costs. The house is occupied and eviction sounds like something I don’t want to deal with, but in this situation it seems worth it. The title information listed on auction.com shows only one loan but I plan on doing a more thorough check and purchasing title insurance. My main worries are that I will get outbid initially and will have wasted money on title search and insurance or that there is a bit of a recession while I am fixing it up an I would have to rent instead of selling it. I am new to this and am sure I am overlooking at least something. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Sam