@hollow has the tax piece right. The exclusion's value to you isn't the $250,000 ceiling, it's whatever tax you would otherwise owe on your actual gain, and on $30,000 that's a real number rather than a rounding error. What the exclusion doesn't do at your price point is drive the decision, because you'd clear that gap or not based on the renovation math alone.
What matters more at $95,000 is that your fixed costs don't scale down with the price. Selling costs are a percentage, so those shrink, but a permit is a permit, a roof is a roof, and a dumpster costs the same in a town of 4,000 as it does in a city. A $12,000 septic replacement is 13 percent of your purchase price and would be 4 percent on a $300,000 house. That's the real low-price-point risk, and it's why rural live-in flips live or die on the inspection rather than on the tax treatment.
The other thing to check before you buy is the ceiling on your street. In small markets there's often a price above which nothing sells, no matter how nice the finishes are. If comparable houses in that town top out at $135,000, your $150,000 after-repair number is the whole deal and it needs to come from actual sales rather than from what your work feels like it's worth. Bear in mind that around a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, so in those markets you'll be working from an agent's records instead of public data.
