1940 Piedmont Cottage Steps from Piedmont Lake — $77,700

The price is $77,700. For that you get a 936-square-foot, three-bedroom house built in 1940 with a metal roof, new windows, updated wiring, and new flooring throughout. That is a meaningful amount of work already done on a house at this price point.

The location is the other thing. Piedmont Lake is within walking distance. Tappan and Clendening Lakes are a few minutes by car. If you fish, boat, kayak, or hunt, you are close to all of it without paying lake-front prices to get there. Three lakes in range and you can walk to one of them. That is the whole pitch, and it holds up.

The house itself is small. 936 square feet across three bedrooms means the rooms are tight. One bathroom. The bones go back to 1940, and while the windows, wiring, and flooring have been updated, this is still a compact older house. The agent mentions new walls in places, which suggests some renovation happened inside, though the listing does not go into detail on what or when. The yard is described as big, which relative to a 936-square-foot house likely means it genuinely has some room to it. Aluminum siding on the exterior. The bath has been updated.

At $83 a square foot, you are paying almost entirely for the location and the improvements, not the square footage. If you want a primary residence and need space, this probably falls short. But as a full-time home for someone who spends most of their time outside, or as a seasonal place near the water, the math works differently. The major systems have been touched, the price is low, and the lake is at the end of the street.

What you do not know from this listing: interior photos do not tell you the full condition of a 1940 house, and the agent description is thin on specifics. Worth a visit before you read too much into the updates list.