alt Hacker NewsThis is the same thing that happened back in the day. I remember seeing ads to buy castles in Europe for under $10,000. I made a quip about it to my boss and he said he was seriously looking into it as he was really big into real estate at the time.
He assumed he would have to put some money into it, but not the millions the fine print said they would need to invest to bring it up to a livable standard - which required a ton of construction, electrical and plumbing as a starter. He kind of scoffed at it once he started learning all of the details.
I also remember seeing the same thing when entire blocks of houses were being sold during the housing crash after 2008. Majority of the houses were in really bad neighborhoods (the ads for houses in Detroit were eye opening) or conversely way TF out in never never land where some developer decided to build some neighborhood development that went belly up after the crash and was stuck with half finished houses and no way to pay to get them finished.
in 2012 I had a chance to buy a duplex in a relatively desirable neighborhood for $25k. It needed about $25k in rehab, but $50k in that area was unheard of.
My (now ex) wife was against buying it because we had not bought a home for ourselves yet, and even trying to explain that we could buy it, live in one side, rent the other for the full cost of the mortgage and then some was not enough to convince her, so I let it slide as no amount of money was worth the never-ending argument that it would have caused.
That duplex is worth about $450k now, and if I had gone through with it it would have generated a conservative $200k in rent income in the meantime.
If I had known the relationship would have been over in less than 5 years from that point, I probably would have bought it anyway, but at the time my mentality was "happy wife, happy life", naively thinking that there was a way to make someone happy who refused to be happy.