The $50,000 house I didn't buy

A foreclosure came up on the MLS one morning, listed at fifty thousand dollars. Four-bedroom single-family, in a working-class Massachusetts city I'd been buying in for a couple of years. Fifty grand. That's not a typo and it wasn't a misprint. The bank had it priced like that on purpose.

I called the listing agent before I'd finished my coffee. First offer in. Full ask. Cash. They accepted that afternoon.

Even by 2014 numbers it was insane. Same house cosmetically flipped would have moved at $70K, maybe $80K, the same week. Twenty grand on a phone call.

A few days later I drove out for the walk-through. The door was unlocked. That should've been the first thing. I pushed it open and the front hallway was dark, no power, but I could hear voices coming from somewhere deeper in the house.

Not a TV. Not a furnace knocking on. People.

I'm not going to tell you I wasn't scared. I was. I was a thirty-something Chinese guy alone in a foreclosed house in a part of town the listing photos didn't really show. But I'd been through enough broken houses by then to know running was the wrong move, so I called out. Hello. I asked, in plain English, what they were doing in here.

The voices stopped.

I took a couple steps in and could see down into what would've been a living room. Sleeping bags on the floor. A hot plate. Plastic bags from the dollar store. No people though. They'd heard me, they'd hidden.

I backed out, closed the door, drove a few blocks, and called the cops.

The officer who showed up was a good guy. Patient with me. Took the situation seriously. Then he told me, basically: you're not the homeowner. The bank is. You don't actually have any right to be in there either. Don't go back inside. The bank has to handle it through their own process.

I want to spend a second on what he was actually saying, because this is the thing about pre-closing foreclosure walk-throughs that no one writes down. A purchase contract gives you the right to inspect the property, with the listing agent. It doesn't give you the right to remove anyone, or to call the cops on the bank's behalf, or really to be in there at all if it's clearly occupied. The bank still owns the house until you close. And to remove the people inside, the bank has to file in court, and in Massachusetts that summary process eviction takes ninety days minimum, six months when it's contested, longer when there's a kid involved or it's the wrong side of December.

If I closed on the house with those people inside, all of that became my problem. My filing, my lawyer, my mortgage payment for six months while the property earned zero.

I drove home thinking about the worst version. Close, inherit them, six months of summary process. They tear out the copper while it plays out. They set a small fire in the kitchen one night when they're cold. The judge gives one of them every accommodation because she has nowhere to go. None of that is paranoid. It's just the actual shape of how those situations go.

I called my agent the next morning. Walked. The house went off the market within a week. I never went back to find out who bought it.

What I learned in the years after this was that my fear had been right but for the wrong reasons. I was thinking about guns and drugs in that moment. The actual danger was the legal system. Massachusetts squatter law is among the most occupant-friendly in the country. You can't change locks on someone, even if they have zero right to be there, even if you have full title. You can't shut off the heat. You can't move their belongings. The state takes housing very seriously, and the courts are slow, and a thoughtful lawyer can keep someone in a house they have no right to for the better part of a year.

So when I was driving home that afternoon, scared of getting shot, the thing I was actually scared of was a court calendar.

The math part is easy. Eleven years. The same property, in that market, today: somewhere north of $400K. Eight times what I would've paid for it. Even if you penalize that hard for the rehab, the legal fees, the carrying costs while clearing the squatters, you're still looking at $250–300K of equity I didn't capture, plus a decade of rent.

I know all that. I've known it for years. I don't run the math on this house anymore.

There's a kind of real estate writer who would tell you I should have been braver. Pushed through. Trusted my gut. That kind of writer thinks fear is always the enemy of returns. I don't agree with that, and this house is one of my pieces of evidence. Sometimes fear is your nervous system noticing that you don't have enough information yet. The right move with a thing you don't fully understand isn't to bid harder. It's to walk and learn.

I'd been buying broken houses for years before this. I had no problem with stolen pipes, rotted roofs, mold, cosmetic disasters. Those are physical things with physical fixes. This house wasn't a physical problem. It was a legal-and-human-system problem in a state I didn't yet understand.

I was a younger person when this happened. I made the call a younger version of me could honestly defend with what he knew. I've come around to thinking that's most of what decent operator decisions look like.

The house came on the market. I had it under offer. I walked. It went off the market. I haven't typed that address into Zillow once. That property is somebody else's life now.

那也不是我的事情。

It's not my business anymore.