In my opinion, most people are so obsessive about mitigating exceedingly rare downside risk that they throw their whole lives away, leaving nothing worth protecting.
New home prices are more than double that.
Even renting a home costs more than $1/sq ft per month in the area where we own our rental property.
Congratulations. You sound like you'd fit right in with my family. Most of us have been building things for a long time.
Note to anyone else who might want to give it a whirl - you don't have to buy all the tools. Most of them and all the larger tools are available to rent on long or short-term rental contracts at rates that will save you money if you're only gonna do the project once. The skills are the important things to own yourself.
Be open to learning and unafraid of the mantra that you either do it right or you do it over again until you have done it right.
It mostly seemed like something to benefit buyers given that, and I would assume that a company changing hands would mean the the purchasing party has already done their due diligence.
With that said, I've still got a few friends who enjoy living there, so to each their own I suppose.
The police were actually pretty decent, as was enforcement of other policies like "your grass is half an inch too long" type stuff that I'd heard of elsewhere. For the most part, if the house didn't look like a junkyard or have a lot of visible peeling paint, they didn't pester people overmuch.
You will, of course, not be able to get insurance nor sell the house later on, among many other hurdles related to liability.
Not dissing the idea of DIY, to be clear. Just noting for the audience that freedom is power and power is responsibility.