The mortgage the buyer received for the home was arguably fraudulent. 

Is it a little more of a gamble?

It’s all a gamble no matter how you look at it, crazy times....

That same freedom allows for positive as well as negative things (think internet gambling and the child porn and the malware and scammers).

Make them police the fraudulant recipiants of my tax dollars.

I do the same with my stoke portfolio... you have your retirement funds that you put in stable long term thinking companies, then you "gamble" with the rest haha

Very rare opportunity indeed.And sure, some will come in here and poo-poo all over this idea once again, talking about how Stockton is a tertiary market, we're at the top of the market, the bubble is about to burst, and so on and so on...But remember, they said the same thing about Sacramento, too...If it were me, I would take the gamble on Downtown Stockton, develop some millennial bait with some cool lofts or something and maybe a few high tech features in the home, and ride this development wave out and watch the property values skyrocket.Or you could always just buy that turn-key property you've never seen in some far away state and hope you don't get screwed over by the developer like a reader of my weekly newsletter just did... but that wouldn't be very wise now would it?

They may have nice appreciation but that's a bit of a gamble.

It would be better to pay whatever it is for testing soil out of pocket before closing and lose the money if tanks leaking then to buy the house as a gamble and have to re-mediate afterwards.

I don't know if they were bad at business or straight fraudulent but they lost their investors tons of money and one day just disappeared from the scene.