It is depressing to me that reasonable housing in my neighborhood has a zero more than reasonable housing in your neighborhood. $40k won't buy a hole in a ground on which to build a house around here. I'm watching a couple quarter-acre plots and the cheapest one is $300k.
Yeah I'm my part of town 200k buys you 3000sf of tear down facing a school parking lot on one side and a drug house on the other. Builder bought it built a new 2200sf house and flipped it for 800k! Crazy times in Seattle real estate. Also in your price range I don't recommend that you buy a fixer upper. Even if you have to spend 120k to get the house you want it's a better deal than the 80k fixer. Reason being that material cost and labor costs are pretty much the same everywhere. Kitchen remodel will run you 10-12, roof will cost you 5 heat will cost you 3-5 depending on how much work. And the unknown unknowns are killer. You start tearing shit up and you find wiring mold or other problems and you are in for some unexpected serious costs. You need 20-30 k of buffer cash to deal with renovation costs. For a 80k house that's the entire down payment. We ended up getting a fixer because there was no inventory in our area. 2 years later it's finnally livable but we lived without a kitchen for 6 month no ceiling drywall for 8, cold as balls dust everywhere wife hated it drove her nuts. We came out ahead because houses cost more here but on a cheaper house it wouldn't be worth it.
Well, reasonable here is actually about $80-140k. There are of course houses that are much more expensive, and then the trailer parks. The $40k house is, in my opinion, less of a house and more of a thing. It's like a box of nightmares you can walk inside. I really don't know why she texted it to me, because she must know I'd be opposed to it from the get go. We did though, almost luck out and tried to get our hands on a really nice house for about $55k a year or so back. The person who owned it was underwater and was trying to sell it quick. We were very impressed by it. Unfortunately, the bank he owed to seized it and turned around to put it back on the market for over twice that price. That sucked, for him and us.