Perpetually priced-out Londoners sick of exorbitant house prices and poky homes are low-hanging fruit for one of Europe’s €1 home schemes.
What could be more appealing than year-round sunshine in your very own period house perched in a picturesque village in Italy or France?
But, if the prospect of owning a house for substantially less than the price of your morning latte sounds a bit too good to be true, well, the bad news is, it might be.
The locations might be too remote for some, you’ll have to commit to renovating within a set timescale and in some cases, agree to move there permanently.
And yet, as Amanda Holden and Alan Carr have showed across two series of the BBC programme Amanda and Alan’s Italian Job, where they buy and renovate €1 homes, first in Sicily and then in Tuscany, the results can be both striking and lucrative.
This month marked the four-year anniversary of The Good Kitchen (goodforgood.com), a community kitchen delivering food cooked from surplus market supplies to those in need in the Sicilian village of Mussomeli.
The founder is Australian Danny McCubbin, 60, a chef and food campaigner who spent 17 years working for Jamie Oliver in London, setting up two community kitchens in the capital during the pandemic, before buying a €1 home and moving to Mussomeli in 2020.
He set up the kitchen in premises in the town centre, a more central base than the house he had bought.
“I ended up selling my €1 house back to the same agency in 2021. That was much easier to do then as there were fewer houses on the market,” he says.
“You can still buy a €1 house and there are some beautiful properties but on average you’re spending €20,000 to renovate now and many foreigners are spending that amount on houses that don’t need as much work.
“My top three tips for anyone thinking of doing this are: be sure to visit in winter, both to check the condition of the roof and to see how different life is then; there are plenty of estate agents now so tour them all; and check out other towns offering affordable homes, places like Siculiana and Montallegro.”
Danny rents a room from a friend in Mussomeli, returning there for four nights a week to run the community kitchen, and now owns a small farm near the sea in Torre Salsa.
“It was always a dream of mine to learn how to grow, harvest and produce olive oil,” he says. “Torre Salsa is a beautiful area, a nature reserve that reminds me of Australia and I have 75 olive trees.”
The Italian €1 homes scheme was first introduced in Sicily in 2008, in an attempt to repopulate rural areas as younger generations left in search of work. The number of residents in once-thriving villages plummeted and homes were left to slowly decay. To re-energise these areas, local authorities offered
homes under their control for a nominal, eye-catching sum. “In recent years, many Italian villages have joined the €1 house initiative designed to being new life to historic centres,” explains Simone Rossi, co-founder of property portal Gate-away.com.
“These are mostly located in regions such as Sicily, Sardinia, Abruzzo, Puglia and Basilicata, featuring property with authentic charm but requiring major renovation work.”
An example of what can be achieved by this renovation work was provided by Sicilian architects Studio Didea, which renovated a three-storey house in Sambucca di Sicilia, with rooms in the property then rented on Airbnb for a period.
The firm created a bold, contemporary yet still sympathetic interior to the two-bedroom property, which shows the potential in these often crumbling buildings.
The main advantage, says Rossi, is the opportunity to own a home in a typical Italian village with a much lower cost of living than in the UK. “On the other hand, the €1 price is purely symbolic,” he adds, pointing out that tax and legal costs must all be added on.
“The properties are almost always in a state of disrepair, requiring extensive renovation. This is not a solution for those looking for a move-in-ready home as the process requires careful planning and the support of reliable professionals.”
More recently France has joined the party, with the town of Ambert in the country’s south-east, two hours-drive west from Lyon, the latest place to offer €1 homes for sale.
Second-home buyers can look away: one condition is that buyers move to the former paper mill town full-time for at least three years.
With a population of just over 6,500, the picturesque town of medieval streets is known for producing Fourme d’Ambert cheese and has a distinctive circular town hall.
Its offer of cheap housing is part of a five-year re-population plan launched by the mayor, which has already seen an extra class added to the town’s primary school.
Last year Saint-Amand-Montrod, three hours due south from Paris, was the first town in France to offer a €1 house, with the local authority even offering to subsidise some of the estimated €128,000 renovation costs. The owner had to commit to living there for at least 10 years.
In 2018, Legrad in the north of Croatia on the border with Hungary, offered five homes for one Kuna, the equivalent of around 10p today.
The scheme was reborn in 2024 after Croatia joined the Eurozone, with houses now priced at 13 cents. Buyers had to be 45 or over and have never previously owned a property.
In Italy, the country with most €1 homes for sale, buyers must demonstrate that they have the funds to renovate, commit to plan the renovation within one year and complete works within three.
Buyers often must pay a set refundable amount (up to €5,000) to the municipality as a guarantee that works will be carried out to the agreed standard.
Renovation costs are — very roughly — estimated at €800 to €1,000 per square metre and a starting guideline of €25,000 (£21,600) for renovation costs is typical.
And of course, British passport holders without specific long-stay visas must also factor in rules allowing them to stay only 90 days in every 180 in the Eurozone.
For those undeterred, the first step is to identify your favoured location and property. Websites including renovita.net/properties, case1euro.it and 1eurohouses.com list some of the properties for sale but generally, contact is through the local authority.
Properties are concentrated in Sicily and Sardinia but there are options in northern Tuscany too.
British-born Rebecca Lewis Lalatta has lived in Sardinia for three decades, raising her family there and founding and managing Rebecca in Sardinia, a villa rental company focused on Costa Smerelda on the elite northeast coast.
It’s an area that attracts royalty, celebrities and the uber-wealthy with prime waterfront villas renting for upwards of €50,000 (£43,300) a week in high season. But as the second-largest island in the Mediterranean, Sardinia also offers €1 homes for sale, including currently in the village of Ollolai.
“The €1 home scheme in Sardinia certainly sounds tempting,” says Lewis Lalatta. “During the recent US elections, a client of mine, a Harvard lecturer, forwarded an article to me offering Ollolai as a potential escape route for Americans.
“It’s a special place, deep in one of the most remote and beautiful parts of the island. The scheme could work well for those seeking an alternative lifestyle in one of the world’s precious blue zones where traditional Sardinian values are sacrosanct.
“Those jumping on it as a bargain, however, should be aware that renovation costs are high, communication may be difficult without fluent Italian and the culture and workings of local administrative offices will probably be very different to what they are used to.
“Over 90 per cent of potential candidates will abandon ship once they realise this.”
© The Standard Ltd