Get Rich! Buy Occupied Properties!

We just closed on our first investment property. We bought it through Auction.com. I had been researching, studying BP, and listening to their podcast nonstop- finally I knew I was one of those people I'd heard and read about- I was overanalyzing and was never going to "pull the trigger" unless I just took a shot. I'd studied the county website, along with the current foreclosures and Auction.com. There was a house on Auction.com that seemed like a good deal, but it was listed as Occupied. I can sometimes tell by an online search if someone is really living in the house-and this particular house seemed to have an elderly widower living in it. I was able to learn all about the couple who had originally built the house-the wife died in 2012 and everything pointed to the fact that her husband was still living in the house. There was no way I was going to evict a grandpa- and I was sad that someone else would actually do it. I moved on and put that house out of my  head. Several weeks later we were looking at an old church for sale in the same town as the Auction.com house. This town is nearly two hours away from our house- we live in Aspen and there's no way we can afford real estate anywhere near here. We were on our way out of town and my husband saw this group of houses way out on the edge of town. I'd spent a lot of time in this town "driving for dollars" and I'd never noticed the group of houses before. We drove over to this subdivision of seven houses and one of the houses was clearly vacant- of course it was the Auction.com house! We got out to look in the windows- the house was vacant, it had been winterized, and later we learned that the gas and electric had been left on. We knocked on the next door neighbor's door and introduced ourselves- we learned that the widower's children had come the previous fall to take him out of state to live with them-we were the only bidders on this house and as of now, we got a great deal! Details of the purchase will be in my next post.