Italy giving away FREE houses and/or PAYING YOU to live there! Wow!

[Lucas88]

That last photo looks terrible...Who would live in that place?

I think that the idea is that you are sold the house for next to nothing and then have the responsibility to renovate it yourself.

Such an agreement incentivizes people to look after those properties and prevent them from completely decaying.

You might get a house in a picturesque Italian town for merely a euro but then you have to work on it and make it fit for human habitation.

Not a bad deal if you want a vacation home in the countryside of Southern Europe and are into renovating properties.

[yick]

I don't think you can use them as holiday homes, you have to live in them for a certain amount of time, they have a similar scheme in parts of Spain, you need to bring a family with kids, provide towards the local economy and create jobs and have to show money in the bank - a minimum of 30 grand to be able to do them up - I remember watching a documentary of some Brit who bought one of those one Euro houses in Italy and he said the problem was getting workmen to do the work because you would get workmen and they wouldn't turn up or they would up the agreed price for the work and all other kinds of bushman crap - with those kinds of projects, I think it is best suited to handyman types who know how to renovate houses themselves rather than relying on workmen in a foreign country if you don't speak the language - it would probably end up cheaper buying a house for its proper price than getting one of these one Euro 'bargains' in the arse end of nowhere.