I have some news about the Skanky Neighbor House next door: it has been foreclosed upon and is being auctioned off on the first Tuesday in August! I saw this in the legal notices section of our local paper. The original loan amount was reported as $75,000.00 - the property alone is worth way more than that, even if the Pigbys did trash the house all to hell.

This may not mean the end of Skanky Neighbor stories because everyone who's lived in that house has been at best odd, at worst total skanks (Pigbys!). The lady who used to do our lawn thinks the house itself is cursed, and that even if you're normal when you move in *cue eerie sound effect* the house will get you sooner or later. I'm torn - it's been nice not to have any loud, obnoxious neighbors strewing trash (and toilets!) around their lawn, but I suppose having the house occupied would bode better for our chances of selling ours.

I'm not sure how the auction thing works. Like, does bidding start at the amount owed on the loan, or does bidding start at whatever someone offers? Does the bank have to sell it for whatever the highest bid is, or can they keep it if the only bids are ridiculously low? It seems like with the abundance of foreclosures, the bank would want to sell it for (almost) whatever they could get, to at least make some money instead of having yet another title in the huge file of defaulted-mortgages. While it seems most unlikely that we could pick up that property for $10, I wonder who'd bid on it with the house in its totally trashed state, when even our small local paper is chock-full of foreclosed property auctions. It seems like you could bid a little more and get a house that was ready for resale or rental, so why bother with this one?

Do any of y'all know how that works?