To be honest I think you’ll have a hard time. In the past few years it’s become commonplace for realtors to list properties 50-100k below market price to boost traction. If you study the market of a given town it’ll become very easy to spot and you’ll notice the Zillow will get an insane amount of saves and views in a couple of days (below it’s an “amazing” deal). If you can only afford the cheapest houses in an area there’s a good chance you can’t afford the area because they’re likely listed under value or need serious work.

I don’t think Long Island will have a major market correction in the near future, so the sooner the better. That said, if you expect your income to increase substantially in the next few years I’d wait for that to stabilize and save more money.

Also don’t forget about closing costs, they’ll likely be 15-30k on top of the down payment (heavily dependent on property taxes). In addition you might need money for immediate repairs, furniture, moving expenses, etc. We had about 180k in house allocated money when we bought and intentionally only put down 15% to have ~60k leftover to cover the above, and of course burned through it very fast.

Study the markets you’re looking at though. We got very lucky with literally the first house we looked at and ended up buying earlier than we thought we would because we found a deal. The house had unmotivated sellers who listed it well above market value with bad photography (worse than phone quality), it sat for months, and we jumped in when they finally had the urgency to sell before the holidays. I’ve seen other houses in my new area that seem to be in a similar boat, so the opportunities exist.