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1-Euro Houses

1eurohouses.com

41–50 of 196 posts

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#41
post #12
post #5

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above…

Can you buy someplace in Spain where the market isn't awful and hold there? Or maybe the answer is to be a house renter your entire life and just save in other ways?

Spain has a big issue which OP didn't mention. We built more houses than were needed between 2000-2008. Which sadly means a ton of the emoty homes are owned by Banks, so if they devalue the houses their stock price plummets. So they are incentivized to keep the prices artificially high.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#42
post #10
post #5

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above…

This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system. At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.

Land tax also does not allow you to simply exist - you have to make a profit to pay the tax. You can't just grow your own food and ignore the economy. It also comes with perverse incentives, like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell.

Perhaps it's a uniquely American view, having no connection to the land you live on, looking at it as just an economic resource to be 'allocated'.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#43
post #10
post #5

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above…

This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system. At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.

And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that specific reason ( if they have only one piece of land )

The problem is that we are pilling into cities where land is minimal and thus the market works in supply and demand.

Hopefully as years pass, where remote work is more and more accessible you can be owning your own 1 euro or whatever home in any area and not worry about limited land.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#44
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more properties available in Italy that would not likely require 200k button the order of 10s of thousands. Maybe that’s your ticket?

Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k. People here say these are remote but that is really mostly just how "spoiled" (in quotes because I'm "spoiled" that way too!) Germans are with commute. You can be 1 hour drive away (including traffic) from many fairly central places in Berlin & have very cheap housing outside the city (partially this is…

> within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap

1hr drive from central London is probably still in central London, though ;-)

1hr train from London gets you to areas where a reasonable 3 bed semi is ~£300k I guess.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#45
post #4

If Italy is anything like Germany in terms of conservation laws, you wouldn't want those buildings even if they were accompanied by a small to medium pile of cash. It will cost you more than building anew to restore usability while observing all the conservatory dos and don'ts.

and the results might be backward to live in, we used to live in a old cottage house that was renovated, split into a moltitude of small apartment units and sold separately; city council didn't allow to install shutters or to add balconies; with only blinds you get a ton of heat getting in on summer and without balconies we had to dry laundry in house, which was then often moist in winter.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#46
post #37

don't fall for it. The market says these aren't worth buying. Don't go against the market.

It really depends on the price. At 150k€ they're not worth buying, at 1€ plus taxes, deposits and various renovation works... Maybe. One might get a nice vacation house for cheap. One of such houses (not those shown in the video) was actually near the places where I grew up. Such place is nowadays decently connected (still sub-optimal, but decent). If somebody was forward-looking enough could have bought property for…

How would you ever get 1Gb/s over a copper last mile?

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#47
post #17

I looked into this pretty extensively when Italy announced it and like most government initiatives there it's a borderline scam and was done for the PR not because it makes sense. Each of these houses requires extensive renovation work, usually of the type that can only be performed by an expensive specialized contractor. Besides the expected costs for this work (Which will be at least 20k Euros up to 200k or more) y…

In theory, could someone who wanted to spend a year in Italy buy one of these houses for 1 Euro and just not initiate any of that repair work?

you'll find a lot of issues living in a house without a 'certificato di abitabilità', connecting utilities might be outright impossible and you might be fined/removed from the premises.

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#48
post #21

don't fall for it. The market says these aren't worth buying. Don't go against the market.

> There's an old joke that has two economists coming across a $20 bill on the sidewalk, which goes: > The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!" > Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."

but these are more along the lines of "there's nothing more expensive than a cheap bmw"

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#49
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that takes as much time as watching the talking head.

You might be missing that it is possible to download the subtitle using tools like youtubedl

It is, from the documentation: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/#subtitle-options

youtube-dl --sub-lang LANG --write-auto-sub --skip-download URI

Re: 1-Euro Houses

#50
post #43
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system. At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.

And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that spe…

I really don't understand this argument. Land taxes are supposed to pay for the various services in the area (schools, roads, etc). You don't pay your fair share and be done, you pay every year because those services cost money every year. If, at some point, you can no longer afford those costs (excluding those situations where social welfare safety nets are supposed to help), you move somewhere else. You don't get to keep taking advantage those services without paying for them just because you've been there for a long time.
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