16 ms·

1-Euro Houses

162 points by Shinobuu 6y ago

Raed667 6y ago
This video [0] "The Truth Behind Italy's $1 Homes" by Business Insider, explains the concept, the motivation behind it and how these houses will cost you way more than 1$ in fees and restoration efforts. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM
- nottorp 6y ago
  Transcript? Rather not watch a talking head.
  - TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
    You can usually read the CC autogenerated by YouTube
    - nottorp 6y ago
      But that takes as much time as watching the talking head.
      - freemint 6y ago
        You might be missing that it is possible to download the subtitle using tools like youtubedl
        nottorp 6y ago
        I didn't know that... however that's like paying for a VPN and two Netflix accounts to be able to get all Netflix content. I'd rather just ignore them if they don't want my business.
        severine 6y ago
        It is, from the documentation: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/#subtitle-options https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/#subtitle-options youtube-dl --sub-lang LANG --write-auto-sub --skip-download URI
  - prawn 6y ago
    I'm even lazier than you, so I won't watch it and just guess: I suspect that the purchase is contingent on you committing funds to restoration that honour history (if appropriate) or code. e.g., you can't buy a ruined castle, make it remotely liveable and camp there; you'd need to deal with local council, sewage, plumbing, running electricity, etc. Where a certain technique of centuries-old stonework was used, you'd need to find the lone expert accredited in renovating and securing walls, etc. There are hundreds of amazing ruins around Australia that the land owners can't justify renovating because the costs to do it justice are too much. Huge shame.
  - w-m 6y ago
    There's some listing of the expenses being done at https://youtu.be/nP2vtDLTAgM?t=412 https://youtu.be/nP2vtDLTAgM?t=412 Listing $1 Taxes $400 Deposit $5,600 Renovations $60,000 Flights $10,000 Earlier they talk about taxes + fees totalling about $3,000. A few seconds after listing the expenses they cite a Forbes article, where one residents expects to spend $124,000 to renovate their place. They talk about some of these homes requiring at least $17,000 of renovations to be done. The houses are sometimes auctioned off, starting at $1, but they may be sold for more than $20,000. The deposit is refundable if you start renovating within a year after buying the house.
    - nottorp 6y ago
      Thank you kind sir or madam or alien!
  - hadlock 6y ago
    If you click the ellipsis (...) above the subscribe button there's an option to "open transcript" which pops up in the top right corner. You can copy-paste the whole thing into notepad or whatever.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  The website explains that on the 'How it works' page: https://1eurohouses.com/how-it-works-and-benefits/ https://1eurohouses.com/how-it-works-and-benefits/
bobwernstein 6y ago
don't fall for it. The market says these aren't worth buying. Don't go against the market.
- brainwad 6y ago
  The market (especially in real estate) is not totally frictionless and arbitrage-free. Plus people can have genuinely different valuations for consumable assets (like housing) - that's the entire point of a market, to facilitate trade where both sides make a gain on the transaction. I don't think anyone would buy these houses as an investment, but if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, maybe it could work for you.
  - prawn 6y ago
    Maybe rewrite that as "if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, had experience managing a challenging renovation in a foreign country, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spare to put towards the required renovations, maybe it could work for you."
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  The market is stupid and inefficient. When the market tells you to do something, it's too late.
- staz 6y ago
  > 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."
  - prawn 6y ago
    I swear I've seen this pasted in 10+ times over the years on HN and this is probably the most directly relevant of them all.
corty 6y ago
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.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  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.
- bromuro 6y ago
  Rules in Italy about restoration are very detailed, but, depending to the place, restoration using original materials and techniques is not that expensive, it may be even cheaper. In Italy, at least in my experience, what increases the costs are taxes, and requirements to declare the “habitability” of a place...
iagovar 6y ago
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 the market, so even if If I was able to buy for 1€ I would be paying taxes over 100k or whatever the value. If you talk to some owners they seem to not care. Yeah they know that their property is falling apart but they won't sell under $value because they bought it at that price or similar reasonings. So as an individual, what can I do? I don't want to be renting my whole life, I actually want to buy property but the market just doesn't adjust for some reasons. Remember we're talking about Spain, where the job market is shit, and the economy just can't keep up with the events.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  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?
  - ido 6y ago
    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 because traffic is actually not that bad in Berlin & partially because it's in the middle of an otherwise fairly empty & large plain[0]). In comparison nowhere within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap, nor from SF/LA/NYC or heck even Tel Aviv. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k Do you have any examples? I could never find anything larger than a matchbox in a village for under $200k in Germany. Anything decent I found in the outskirts of any big city was over 500k.
mooreds 6y ago
Reminds me a bit of this: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-9-cities-states-and-countries-will-pay-you-to-move-there-2018-10-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-9-cities-states-and-... > While Topeka gets its program [to pay people to move there] underway, other places in America and across the globe are already trying to entice new residents with cash and other perks. Here’s a look at some other spots that would love to have you think about living there.
ciguy 6y ago
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) you will be responsible for paying for many different permits to do this work which can also add up to 100s of Euros. Then you will find out that you get only one year from purchase to complete all renovations or you forfeit your investment. After all this if you still aren't convinced you will find that the local governments will take months to issue each permit. The few specialized contractors licensed to perform the work will not show up for weeks at a time randomly whenever they feel like it. After one year you will have paid tens of thousands of Euros to local governments and contractors and your house will be worse than when you started. Since you didn't meet the deadline the local government will take the house back and sell it for 1 Euro to the next sucker in line. This is a stimulus program for local governments and contractors in small Italian towns, and you are the source of funding if you decide to try to buy one of these houses.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  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?
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    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.
  - ciguy 6y ago
    No, you cannot live in the house until it is certified as habitable. Like many things in Italy this would no doubt be flexible with the right "permits" paid for to the right officials. But the houses would likely have no working electricity, heat, water or plumbing. So you wouldn't really want to live there anyway.
TheButlerian 6y ago
Italians are well known for being scammers, lazy and unprofessional. If you buy a place there - you are crazy.
- devteambravo 6y ago
  Do we really need to discriminate against an entire nationality? What the hell is this nonsense?!
  - aliswe 6y ago
    Agreed, although the comment was quite hilarious in the same time.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
If after a decade of reading about $500 houses in Detroit people haven't figured out what "cost of compliance" means then they probably never will at this point. When you read the words "$<small_number> house" the words you should read in your mind are "dilapidated building in a municipality with crazy back-tax scheme that would make the California RMV proud and probably also regulatory capture by relevant trade(s) that inflates the cost of repairing the building" There's no such thing as a free lunch. You wanna know how much a house costs look at the average income of the working households in the neighborhood. What they can afford is about what it costs.
- imtringued 6y ago
  You get what you pay for. Less extreme example: When people sell their house 30% below market rate then you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that you have to spend that saved 30% on remodeling the home. Cheap properties usually have problems but estimating how much it costs to fix them is difficult if you are not the owner. However, the owner knows that it would take X amount of money to repair the home so he deducts X from the market price to clear the sale. When you're saving 99% expect to replace up to 99% of the house. The only real way to save money is by doing the repairs/remodeling yourself but that's basically a second job.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    If you get a bunch of land for basically free and have to build a new house that’s still great though.
    - corty 6y ago
      Yeah, but you won't. Conservation laws will prevent you from tearing down the old house and instead oblige you to invest to prevent it from falling over on its own.
      - literallycancer 6y ago
        It's Southern Europe. Ask the locals how often they wait for the bureau to allow repairs and how often they just go ahead and do whatever changes they feel are needed.
pulse7 6y ago
Most of those 1-Euro houses are in Sicily, Italy. This is connected to the fact, that "la famiglia" ("the family", mafia) is controlling everything in society. They will even give you presents worth more than 1 Euro, because they know they will get every cent back from you. If you stay long enough there, they will give you orders (like "you need to make this and this") and if you refuse to do it, they will - and I am not kidding or making it up - just kill your children (if you have them). So - no - I would not buy this 1-Euro house in Sicily, Italy. It is cheaper to go to the hotel there than to own anything... People are relocating from Sicily because of this problem...
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > they will - and I am not kidding or making it up - just kill your children Gonna need some form of source on that claim before I’ll believe it. This sounds like something that happened once, but not regularly.
  - pulse7 6y ago
    This has been told by the people who relocated, because they were not willing to risk their children. Another example: if you start your business there, someone from "the family" will come after a while and tell you: "You need a secretary. And I have found one for you." Now if you reject them, they will go after you. This is why people are leaving. It would be a beautiful place to live, but because of this, people are living. Many Italian politicians tried to fight "the family", most of them were killed.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      When I said source I meant something other than more anecdotes.
      - pulse7 6y ago
        People's personal experience is not an anecdote...
berdon 6y ago
This isn't really a 1 Euro house: - Envisage a restructuring and re-evaluation project within 365 days of purchase. - Support notarial fees for registration and volture. - Once all permits are granted, works must start within a maximum of 2 months. - To guarantee the faireness of the purchase by the buyer, the municipality asks to enter into a surety policy of 5 thousand euros lasting for three years that is then refunded.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  So it's about the same as buying a plot of land (where you usally need to build something within a period of time). €1 for a plot of land isn't terrible either. There used to be seaside plots for €1 in northern Sweden, with the caveat that you need to live there permanently for 5 years.
  - aliswe 6y ago
    If I'm not mistaken there are still lots of 100$ plots on HemNet with the same requirements.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
abeppu 6y ago
People on this thread rightly point out that this isn't a great deal b/c the costs to actually get it to livable condition, along with conservation constraints might be quite significant. I think an interesting point of comparison is Japan's policies around abandoned houses, and efforts to try to prop up vanishing rural communities, where aside from repair/renovation and administration costs, the owner can also be obligated to actively farm agricultural land associated with the property. https://blog.gaijinpot.com/buy-abandoned-house-in-japan/ https://blog.gaijinpot.com/buy-abandoned-house-in-japan/
- fomine3 6y ago
  A point in Japan is that property owner can't throw away own properties. So they need to sell unused properties to reduce property taxes.
  - taejo 6y ago
    Can you throw away owned real property elsewhere? The closest I can think of is not paying property taxes and hoping the state/municipality will seize the property and not come after you for the difference. If the actual value of the property is zero or negative it's difficult to come out ahead.
- rwmj 6y ago
  On a similar point, this video goes through the costs of buying an abandoned house in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 To be fair, although there are a lot of "extras", the sums involved still seemed relatively small.
rmason 6y ago
Detroit ten years ago was famous for $1000 houses. But these houses were gutted, without wiring or plumbing or furnaces. In other words a shell, stripped by scrappers. Most of those houses have been torn down. But the city has a program that rebuilds the salvageable houses to better than new then sells them at a bargain. The deal is you must live there as your primary residence for five years. These houses begin at $50,000. https://buildingdetroit.org/rehabbed-ready/ https://buildingdetroit.org/rehabbed-ready/
quda 6y ago
I live in Italy and i've been hunting a 1Euro deal house since long. I've seen dozen in the last 4-5 years. IT DOESN'T WORTH the deal! Long story short: the property cost nothing but the entire property is very narrow, glued to other houses. But the huge disadvantage is the (compulsory investment!) cost of renovation here in Italy: at least 50,000 euros, depending on size. Could go up to 150,000. All of the properties are almost decayed, completely decrepit state. Inhabitable! Personally, we decided to build our wooden small house (villetta di campagna) with less than 50,000.
barrkel 6y ago
This thread is from yesterday. The "ago" times are incorrect. What's going on? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1-euro+houses https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1-euro+houses says 19 hours ago, but as I write it says 12 hours ago on this page.
bromuro 6y ago
During a similar initiative, friends of mine in Italy have been kicked out by the local community, jealous they could enjoy such benefit. Maybe some of these repopulation projects don’t consider enough the effect over the local rural communities, which are usually very conservative and suspicious toward “strangers”.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
if this comes with land, i might be interested. but whats the point of a crumbling house? homes in europe dont come with extensive backyards or gardens. building tiny homes surrounded by an edible landscape and reselling it could be my next hobby-career. its the stuff of day dreams. having said that..it would depend on how it would be taxed. europe? i am going to go with steep.
philprx 6y ago
Assuming plenty of time, not much luxury taste, wanting to ramp up tech skills, limited (but existing) funds Buy one, establish a hacker space, hold regular events, show the awesome projects you do, try to have community-positive impacts. Do some remote gigs for funding. At worse you get kicked out because people don't get technology, don't want you around, find out you're not going to be a source of income. At best, people love what you do, help you renovate because plenty of materials and help can be had in some communities, and you go from homeless to remote tech worker. Is this a crazy scenario?
- namero999 6y ago
  If you ask me, not at all. That's precisely what I'm working on (or at least, it's a part of the project).

162 points by Shinobuu 6y ago

This video [0] "The Truth Behind Italy's $1 Homes" by Business Insider, explains the concept, the motivation behind it and how these houses will cost you way more than 1$ in fees and restoration efforts. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM

nottorp 6y ago
Transcript? Rather not watch a talking head.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  You can usually read the CC autogenerated by YouTube
  - nottorp 6y ago
    But that takes as much time as watching the talking head.
    - freemint 6y ago
      You might be missing that it is possible to download the subtitle using tools like youtubedl
      - nottorp 6y ago
        I didn't know that... however that's like paying for a VPN and two Netflix accounts to be able to get all Netflix content. I'd rather just ignore them if they don't want my business.
      - severine 6y ago
        It is, from the documentation: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/#subtitle-options https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/#subtitle-options youtube-dl --sub-lang LANG --write-auto-sub --skip-download URI
- prawn 6y ago
  I'm even lazier than you, so I won't watch it and just guess: I suspect that the purchase is contingent on you committing funds to restoration that honour history (if appropriate) or code. e.g., you can't buy a ruined castle, make it remotely liveable and camp there; you'd need to deal with local council, sewage, plumbing, running electricity, etc. Where a certain technique of centuries-old stonework was used, you'd need to find the lone expert accredited in renovating and securing walls, etc. There are hundreds of amazing ruins around Australia that the land owners can't justify renovating because the costs to do it justice are too much. Huge shame.
- w-m 6y ago
  There's some listing of the expenses being done at https://youtu.be/nP2vtDLTAgM?t=412 https://youtu.be/nP2vtDLTAgM?t=412 Listing $1 Taxes $400 Deposit $5,600 Renovations $60,000 Flights $10,000 Earlier they talk about taxes + fees totalling about $3,000. A few seconds after listing the expenses they cite a Forbes article, where one residents expects to spend $124,000 to renovate their place. They talk about some of these homes requiring at least $17,000 of renovations to be done. The houses are sometimes auctioned off, starting at $1, but they may be sold for more than $20,000. The deposit is refundable if you start renovating within a year after buying the house.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    Thank you kind sir or madam or alien!
- hadlock 6y ago
  If you click the ellipsis (...) above the subscribe button there's an option to "open transcript" which pops up in the top right corner. You can copy-paste the whole thing into notepad or whatever.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
The website explains that on the 'How it works' page: https://1eurohouses.com/how-it-works-and-benefits/ https://1eurohouses.com/how-it-works-and-benefits/

bobwernstein 6y ago

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

brainwad 6y ago
The market (especially in real estate) is not totally frictionless and arbitrage-free. Plus people can have genuinely different valuations for consumable assets (like housing) - that's the entire point of a market, to facilitate trade where both sides make a gain on the transaction. I don't think anyone would buy these houses as an investment, but if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, maybe it could work for you.
- prawn 6y ago
  Maybe rewrite that as "if you wanted a quiet house in the countryside and spoke Italian already, had experience managing a challenging renovation in a foreign country, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spare to put towards the required renovations, maybe it could work for you."
pietrovismara 6y ago
The market is stupid and inefficient. When the market tells you to do something, it's too late.
staz 6y ago
> 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."
- prawn 6y ago
  I swear I've seen this pasted in 10+ times over the years on HN and this is probably the most directly relevant of them all.

corty 6y ago

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.

LoSboccacc 6y ago
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.
bromuro 6y ago
Rules in Italy about restoration are very detailed, but, depending to the place, restoration using original materials and techniques is not that expensive, it may be even cheaper. In Italy, at least in my experience, what increases the costs are taxes, and requirements to declare the “habitability” of a place...

iagovar 6y ago

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 the market, so even if If I was able to buy for 1€ I would be paying taxes over 100k or whatever the value. If you talk to some owners they seem to not care. Yeah they know that their property is falling apart but they won't sell under $value because they bought it at that price or similar reasonings. So as an individual, what can I do? I don't want to be renting my whole life, I actually want to buy property but the market just doesn't adjust for some reasons. Remember we're talking about Spain, where the job market is shit, and the economy just can't keep up with the events.

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
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?
- ido 6y ago
  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 because traffic is actually not that bad in Berlin & partially because it's in the middle of an otherwise fairly empty & large plain[0]). In comparison nowhere within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap, nor from SF/LA/NYC or heck even Tel Aviv. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k Do you have any examples? I could never find anything larger than a matchbox in a village for under $200k in Germany. Anything decent I found in the outskirts of any big city was over 500k.

mooreds 6y ago

Reminds me a bit of this: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-9-cities-states-and-countries-will-pay-you-to-move-there-2018-10-26 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-9-cities-states-and-... > While Topeka gets its program [to pay people to move there] underway, other places in America and across the globe are already trying to entice new residents with cash and other perks. Here’s a look at some other spots that would love to have you think about living there.

ciguy 6y ago

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) you will be responsible for paying for many different permits to do this work which can also add up to 100s of Euros. Then you will find out that you get only one year from purchase to complete all renovations or you forfeit your investment. After all this if you still aren't convinced you will find that the local governments will take months to issue each permit. The few specialized contractors licensed to perform the work will not show up for weeks at a time randomly whenever they feel like it. After one year you will have paid tens of thousands of Euros to local governments and contractors and your house will be worse than when you started. Since you didn't meet the deadline the local government will take the house back and sell it for 1 Euro to the next sucker in line. This is a stimulus program for local governments and contractors in small Italian towns, and you are the source of funding if you decide to try to buy one of these houses.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
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?
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  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.
- ciguy 6y ago
  No, you cannot live in the house until it is certified as habitable. Like many things in Italy this would no doubt be flexible with the right "permits" paid for to the right officials. But the houses would likely have no working electricity, heat, water or plumbing. So you wouldn't really want to live there anyway.

TheButlerian 6y ago

Italians are well known for being scammers, lazy and unprofessional. If you buy a place there - you are crazy.

devteambravo 6y ago
Do we really need to discriminate against an entire nationality? What the hell is this nonsense?!
- aliswe 6y ago
  Agreed, although the comment was quite hilarious in the same time.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

If after a decade of reading about $500 houses in Detroit people haven't figured out what "cost of compliance" means then they probably never will at this point. When you read the words "$<small_number> house" the words you should read in your mind are "dilapidated building in a municipality with crazy back-tax scheme that would make the California RMV proud and probably also regulatory capture by relevant trade(s) that inflates the cost of repairing the building" There's no such thing as a free lunch. You wanna know how much a house costs look at the average income of the working households in the neighborhood. What they can afford is about what it costs.

imtringued 6y ago
You get what you pay for. Less extreme example: When people sell their house 30% below market rate then you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that you have to spend that saved 30% on remodeling the home. Cheap properties usually have problems but estimating how much it costs to fix them is difficult if you are not the owner. However, the owner knows that it would take X amount of money to repair the home so he deducts X from the market price to clear the sale. When you're saving 99% expect to replace up to 99% of the house. The only real way to save money is by doing the repairs/remodeling yourself but that's basically a second job.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  If you get a bunch of land for basically free and have to build a new house that’s still great though.
  - corty 6y ago
    Yeah, but you won't. Conservation laws will prevent you from tearing down the old house and instead oblige you to invest to prevent it from falling over on its own.
    - literallycancer 6y ago
      It's Southern Europe. Ask the locals how often they wait for the bureau to allow repairs and how often they just go ahead and do whatever changes they feel are needed.

pulse7 6y ago

Most of those 1-Euro houses are in Sicily, Italy. This is connected to the fact, that "la famiglia" ("the family", mafia) is controlling everything in society. They will even give you presents worth more than 1 Euro, because they know they will get every cent back from you. If you stay long enough there, they will give you orders (like "you need to make this and this") and if you refuse to do it, they will - and I am not kidding or making it up - just kill your children (if you have them). So - no - I would not buy this 1-Euro house in Sicily, Italy. It is cheaper to go to the hotel there than to own anything... People are relocating from Sicily because of this problem...

Aeolun 6y ago
> they will - and I am not kidding or making it up - just kill your children Gonna need some form of source on that claim before I’ll believe it. This sounds like something that happened once, but not regularly.
- pulse7 6y ago
  This has been told by the people who relocated, because they were not willing to risk their children. Another example: if you start your business there, someone from "the family" will come after a while and tell you: "You need a secretary. And I have found one for you." Now if you reject them, they will go after you. This is why people are leaving. It would be a beautiful place to live, but because of this, people are living. Many Italian politicians tried to fight "the family", most of them were killed.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    When I said source I meant something other than more anecdotes.
    - pulse7 6y ago
      People's personal experience is not an anecdote...

berdon 6y ago

This isn't really a 1 Euro house: - Envisage a restructuring and re-evaluation project within 365 days of purchase. - Support notarial fees for registration and volture. - Once all permits are granted, works must start within a maximum of 2 months. - To guarantee the faireness of the purchase by the buyer, the municipality asks to enter into a surety policy of 5 thousand euros lasting for three years that is then refunded.

alkonaut 6y ago
So it's about the same as buying a plot of land (where you usally need to build something within a period of time). €1 for a plot of land isn't terrible either. There used to be seaside plots for €1 in northern Sweden, with the caveat that you need to live there permanently for 5 years.
- aliswe 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken there are still lots of 100$ plots on HemNet with the same requirements.

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abeppu 6y ago

People on this thread rightly point out that this isn't a great deal b/c the costs to actually get it to livable condition, along with conservation constraints might be quite significant. I think an interesting point of comparison is Japan's policies around abandoned houses, and efforts to try to prop up vanishing rural communities, where aside from repair/renovation and administration costs, the owner can also be obligated to actively farm agricultural land associated with the property. https://blog.gaijinpot.com/buy-abandoned-house-in-japan/ https://blog.gaijinpot.com/buy-abandoned-house-in-japan/

fomine3 6y ago
A point in Japan is that property owner can't throw away own properties. So they need to sell unused properties to reduce property taxes.
- taejo 6y ago
  Can you throw away owned real property elsewhere? The closest I can think of is not paying property taxes and hoping the state/municipality will seize the property and not come after you for the difference. If the actual value of the property is zero or negative it's difficult to come out ahead.
rwmj 6y ago
On a similar point, this video goes through the costs of buying an abandoned house in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 To be fair, although there are a lot of "extras", the sums involved still seemed relatively small.

rmason 6y ago

Detroit ten years ago was famous for $1000 houses. But these houses were gutted, without wiring or plumbing or furnaces. In other words a shell, stripped by scrappers. Most of those houses have been torn down. But the city has a program that rebuilds the salvageable houses to better than new then sells them at a bargain. The deal is you must live there as your primary residence for five years. These houses begin at $50,000. https://buildingdetroit.org/rehabbed-ready/ https://buildingdetroit.org/rehabbed-ready/

quda 6y ago

I live in Italy and i've been hunting a 1Euro deal house since long. I've seen dozen in the last 4-5 years. IT DOESN'T WORTH the deal! Long story short: the property cost nothing but the entire property is very narrow, glued to other houses. But the huge disadvantage is the (compulsory investment!) cost of renovation here in Italy: at least 50,000 euros, depending on size. Could go up to 150,000. All of the properties are almost decayed, completely decrepit state. Inhabitable! Personally, we decided to build our wooden small house (villetta di campagna) with less than 50,000.

barrkel 6y ago

This thread is from yesterday. The "ago" times are incorrect. What's going on? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1-euro+houses https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1-euro+houses says 19 hours ago, but as I write it says 12 hours ago on this page.

bromuro 6y ago

During a similar initiative, friends of mine in Italy have been kicked out by the local community, jealous they could enjoy such benefit. Maybe some of these repopulation projects don’t consider enough the effect over the local rural communities, which are usually very conservative and suspicious toward “strangers”.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

if this comes with land, i might be interested. but whats the point of a crumbling house? homes in europe dont come with extensive backyards or gardens. building tiny homes surrounded by an edible landscape and reselling it could be my next hobby-career. its the stuff of day dreams. having said that..it would depend on how it would be taxed. europe? i am going to go with steep.

philprx 6y ago

Assuming plenty of time, not much luxury taste, wanting to ramp up tech skills, limited (but existing) funds Buy one, establish a hacker space, hold regular events, show the awesome projects you do, try to have community-positive impacts. Do some remote gigs for funding. At worse you get kicked out because people don't get technology, don't want you around, find out you're not going to be a source of income. At best, people love what you do, help you renovate because plenty of materials and help can be had in some communities, and you go from homeless to remote tech worker. Is this a crazy scenario?

namero999 6y ago
If you ask me, not at all. That's precisely what I'm working on (or at least, it's a part of the project).