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The Italian towns selling houses for €1

theguardian.com

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Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#91

Post by AndrewDavis »

bee_rider wrote: post #38
akudha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might still be appealing to young people, especially those who do not like the noise/pollution of big cities and can't afford them?

I could see the appeal of a shack, but I suspect a castle would be quite a maintainence burden. I guess nowadays one would not need to employ as large a retinue… but you don’t get to tax the local villages anymore. Seems like a wash.

I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.

Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#92

Post by ido »

al_borland wrote: post #72
guywithahat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans". The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became…

> was once referred to as the Paris of America Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0] Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West

I've seen "Paris of the X" and "Venice of the X" applied to many (often not particularly attractive) cities worldwide...

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#93

Post by PeterStuer »

lormayna wrote: post #29

Italian here. This is mostly a marketing initiative. If you buy those houses, you need to completely renew them using local companies and with a lot of regulation. You will probably spend 100k doing that. If you buy another house, in the same village, maybe you will pay 5k but you have more freedom in the renewal process and you will end spending less.

Reminds me of the time I was a local radio DJ. We were inundated with these promotions we had to read for "free" exotic vacations. As you can imagine, the "free" part was completely subsumed in an expensive "package" deal.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#94

Post by Tpt »

yobbo wrote: post #82
thefz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?

1. Accept lower temperature in the stonework/bricks/concrete 2. Use heatpumps, wood furnaces, accumulator tanks 3. Only heat the rooms you use when you use them. It's very doable, especially in Italy.

A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#95

Post by lifestyleguru »

skrlet13 wrote: post #71

i guess this could somewhat? help homeless people. They can not be accused of loitering if they own that land... Better than getting a fine for sleeping on the street? Having an address to your name helps a lot to get a job (classism is very harsh and bad, society is very cruel to homeless people)

There are absolutely no jobs nearby or even within 6 hours commute to these "€1 houses". Probably no running water in summer as well.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#96

Post by lifestyleguru »

cptskippy wrote: post #24

We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole…

> We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast

You really thought it's possible to buy any real estate in a location where rich Germans and Scandinavians pay €1000 for one night in a hotel and moor their €10mln yachts?

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#97

Post by lifestyleguru »

Scramblejams wrote: post #87

A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.” I took his…

Plot twist is he actually bought that chateau and now is full time painting naked French ladies lying on a chaise longue.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#98

Post by robocat »

devilbunny wrote: post #85
thefz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on. Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

"It is well established that high-power microwave radiation can induce cataracts via its thermal effects"

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#99

Post by tossandthrow »

riedel wrote: post #23
tossandthrow wrote: post #7

A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value. As such, even 1 EUR houses might be severely over-valued. It should be interesting as tax code could also take that into consideration.

Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult…

This is exactly the point - there is a strong expectation of positive values, so just saying 1 EUR makes it easy.

IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.

In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.

While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.

Re: The Italian towns selling houses for €1

#100

Post by illiac786 »

robocat wrote: post #98
devilbunny wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on. Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.

"It is well established that high-power microwave radiation can induce cataracts via its thermal effects"

But the previous comment said “low power”?
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