1925 Mobridge Home, 2,052 Sqft, New Electrical and Plumbing — $68,000

Thirty-three dollars a square foot. That's what this one works out to, and it's the first thing that makes you do the math twice. Two thousand and fifty-two square feet in a 1925 house in Mobridge, South Dakota for $68,000.

The bones here are old, but the electrical and plumbing are new, which matters more than most things when you're looking at a century-old house. Flooring is new too. That's a real list of work that somebody already did, and it changes how you think about the price.

The interior is big for two bedrooms. That extra space reads as flexible depending on what you need: a proper home office, a room for guests, a project space. The listing calls it spacious and that's accurate. Two thousand square feet with two bedrooms means rooms that aren't squeezed. You have room to move.

Heat runs on fuel oil right now. There's a natural gas furnace and an exterior AC condenser included with the sale that haven't been connected yet. So you'd be buying a house where the heating and cooling situation is partway through a transition. That's a cost and a decision you'd be making in the first year. Worth knowing before you get there.

Outside, there's a covered front porch, a back deck, and a garden shed. The lot is 50 by 140 feet, which gives you real yard on both sides of the house. The detached garage is a single stall.

The covered front porch is the kind you'd actually use. A chair and a view of the street, morning or evening. That's not nothing.

At this price, with this much space and the major systems already updated, the tradeoff is that you're finishing a job someone else started. The heating setup needs to be sorted. There's probably more to do cosmetically. But the electrical and plumbing work is done, and that's where old houses tend to eat people alive. Someone cleared that particular hurdle.