I Bought a €1 House and Found a Surprise in a Locked Chest
After buying a €1 house in Sicily’s hilltop town of Mussomeli, George Lang discovered £4,000 worth of gold jewelry hidden inside a locked chest.
Buying a house for just €1 sounds like a dream. But money feature writer Brad Young is investigating the reality. A DIY novice found a locked chest containing hidden treasures – but another planned renovation was left unfinished due to hidden costs. Read his full story below.
George Lang found his solid gold necklace inside a biscuit tin, inside a locked chest – inside the house he bought for €1.
The 32-year-old broke open the lock to find £4,000 worth of jewellery after taking part in an Italian scheme to attract buyers to remote towns.
Having left a hectic life in London and staked his future on the house, it’s hard to imagine a better sign that his luck was about to change.
“It was really like something out of a film. It was so bizarre,” Lang tells me from his parents’ home in Eastbourne, where he spends half his time.
The other half he spends in the hilltop Sicilian town of Mussomeli, where he is renovating one of hundreds of abandoned houses that Italian municipalities are selling for the symbolic price of €1 (around 88 British pence).
Quiet villages like Mussomeli, Cammarata and Sambuca are trying to revive their communities as young people move to the cities, leaving behind inherited, dilapidated and unwanted properties that burden them with more taxes than equity.
According to Immobiliare Siciliana, the sole estate agent for these houses, around 150 one-euro houses have been sold in Mussomeli. Immobiliare Siciliana says, "People are interested in buying these houses because it's not only about the location and the village, its position, characteristics, personality, etc., but also about the possibility of investing by buying a property at virtually no cost and renovating the house according to their own taste."
Lang learned about the scheme in 2022, when he was fed up with living paycheck to paycheck in London with no prospect of saving any money.
"I was constantly frustrated by just scraping by and not being able to get ahead in life, even though I was always working," he says.
"We live in a time where life is so expensive, we're constantly being ripped off for every penny, and we're taxed so heavily that we're left with nothing." When, amidst the pandemic, his relationship broke down and he lost his job at Battersea Power Station, he took his last paycheck and took a big risk.
"I got on a plane and bought the first house I saw," Lang says, explaining that he had contacted 30 municipalities in Italy, only one of which offered him the chance to view a property.
"To be honest, I bought the house with every penny I had."
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