What concerns me (and I would appreciate comments from people who may know) is that I might be buying something with a great deal more than $100 in liabilities for cleanup or something. There's no fun in buying ten houses for $100 each if in five years you incurs thousands of dollars of obligations each to bring them up to some code or become liable because someone trespassed and died there or something. Even for a house in Detroit this is ringing my "too good to be true" bells; if it were just a fun thing to buy and see increase in value I gotta think it wouldn't have been that cheap in the first place.