How €1 Homes Changed Mussomeli (and What Happens Next)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:08] Speaker B: It's Saturday morning in Italy and you're listening to the Magic Towns Italy podcast. [00:00:13] Speaker C: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast. [00:00:19] Speaker D: Welcome back. Happy Saturday, everyone. [00:00:22] Speaker C: Happy Saturday. So, yeah, today we are talking about one euro homes Sicily visas. [00:00:29] Speaker D: And before you say, oh no, another episode about €1 homes. We actually starting with something completely novel, which is the first one Euro home program in northern Italy. [00:00:43] Speaker C: What? [00:00:44] Speaker D: Yes, and don't act so surprised. He wrote an article about it. Anyway, just an inside joke. Yeah, so this week. [00:00:53] Speaker C: Yeah, sorry, yeah. [00:00:56] Speaker D: So this week the towns of Reco Auro, posing a Valley del Pazubio, very near Vicenza. And for those who don't know where Vicenza is, that's very near Venice, have announced the first batch of wine Euro homes in those lovely mountain villages. [00:01:16] Speaker C: Oh, okay. And why just now? [00:01:18] Speaker D: Well, you see, it's actually a very interesting area that I personally know, I would say intimately. It was a magnet for tourists about a hundred years ago. Even Nietzsche, the German philosopher, used to go on holiday there and. [00:01:34] Speaker C: Are you joking? [00:01:35] Speaker D: No, no, it really is true. There's proof of it. He wrote about it. He wrote that it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been to. But it kind of fell off the map tourism wise because spas are not as popular now as they used to be in the past in Italy at least. And so even when I was a child, this place, which was a huge tourist magnet, had become less popular. In the past few years it has suffered a massive exodus of people that go and work and live in the nearby cities. So there's a lot of empty homes and quite simply the local governments decided to make them available to investors and people that want to move there preferentially to restore. Very much like the schemes in southern Italy. [00:02:24] Speaker C: Yeah, but these are just the first ones in northern Italy. [00:02:28] Speaker D: Exactly. First ones in northern Italy. So if you want to know more about this, go to MagicTowns.it and read the article in which we cover everything about this brand, brand new program and [00:02:39] Speaker C: be the first one to buy them. [00:02:41] Speaker D: Yeah, maybe. And then we can have a chat about how you feel about it. That is if Anna and I don't buy them first. What else is on our episode today? Anna? [00:02:49] Speaker A: We have an interview. [00:02:51] Speaker E: Yeah. [00:02:51] Speaker C: We met George after visiting Musumeli ourselves and it was. How was it, Luca? Because you went there. [00:03:00] Speaker D: George is the English beating heart of Mussomeli now. We spent half an hour chatting with him about how things are going, how the city is changing now that he has brought in his Massive social media following. He also has some new plans that he briefly mentions and he's going to officially unveil in the next couple of weeks. So without further ado, here's a little excerpt of our chat with George. [00:03:33] Speaker A: How are you doing? [00:03:34] Speaker E: Hi. I think we missed you by a [00:03:35] Speaker C: day of Mr. Melly, but we met [00:03:37] Speaker D: some of your fans. [00:03:38] Speaker A: Even the people that haven't met you, [00:03:40] Speaker D: they're basically all there for you, which is very interesting. We've actually never seen anything like this. [00:03:44] Speaker A: It's been great for Mr. Melly. All the locals are very happy. All the one year houses have been sold now all the prices are slowly starting to creep up and everyone's spending money at the businesses. So is this a win win situation for everyone really? [00:03:56] Speaker D: Absolutely. You know, we live in the north and we found out that for the first time just today, they have started a €1 home scheme just near us, 10 miles away. [00:04:07] Speaker A: Wow. [00:04:08] Speaker D: So that's quite exciting because, you know, Chopari has only been in the south, [00:04:12] Speaker A: I think a lot of the times. You know, one of the reasons people have sort of come to Musumeli is purely just because it's one of the few towns in city which someone's really marketing it heavily. All these towns are pretty similar and they all offer similar cultural experiences, similar house prices. But Musumeli I think it's just got very lucky and the mayor has been a huge positivity because so many of these places, they have so much red tape. You know, with the one year house scheme I went through, there's no upfront deposit. You had three years to do the roof and the facade, which they've now scrapped that rule. And to incentivize people to keep coming, they've now introduced a new rule where you can remove the roof of your one year house and make a garden. The only time I've heard people having bad experiences in the Somali is by using contractors who want to charge you upfront. I know one girl at the moment, she's from LA, she spent 20 grand in a house. I think she agreed to 120,000 pound renovation budget and she paid someone up front or didn't pay them up front. And now the builder thinks they've done 40,000 pound worth of work. She doesn't think 40,000 pound worth of work has been done. She's in legal battle with another contractor. So that's one of the reasons why I like to a lot of the work myself, because all the times I've had about bad experiences always ends up by employing Someone you employ. [00:05:27] Speaker E: Unfortunately, we've been through that. And then when you employ someone new, they blame the old guy. And you never know where the train of responsibility ends or finishes. So it's either no matter what, it's a disaster going forward. [00:05:37] Speaker A: And you don't know if they're cousins or the person you had before. You know, everyone seems to know everyone will be related to someone somehow. [00:05:43] Speaker D: You have to be careful because if you raise the ground around you in these small towns, it's over. [00:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:51] Speaker D: Do you have any plans to rent out your properties? [00:05:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, for my first two properties, I've got a waiting list of about 500 people waiting to stay at the moment. I'm gonna start taking bookings on my website. You know, my departments aren't ready for at least two or three months, but once they're ready, they'll just be rented [00:06:07] Speaker E: out, you know, from living in London. The price per square meter is just insane. So you see it and you see the value, but then you have to think about the money it cost to fix. [00:06:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I was watching a YouTube thing about these women renovating a palace in Palermo and they're saying that the local wanted a €500,000 for a grant to start renovating or just to even begin the process. They wanted half a million just to get guarantee. [00:06:31] Speaker D: Yeah, it must have been a historical. [00:06:32] Speaker A: It was a historical one. Right in the center where you're looking over the main square, like the huge one on the corner. And she was just like, we may be millionaires on paper, but we don't have half a million pounds just to pay for a permit. [00:06:45] Speaker D: What kind of incentive is it? Italy is riddled with old properties. You should do everything you can to make things easy. [00:06:50] Speaker E: I guess the one thing everyone here believes, and we believe in essay, we believe the property is cheap and we believe we should be doing more to bring people in. [00:06:57] Speaker D: That's what we've been working on, finding towns with the local government, they support them because, as you know, everything changes [00:07:03] Speaker A: from time to town because we're in a very good position. And every time I sell a house for Ms. Amelia, I don't get paid for. I'm just doing it out of goodwill. The reason I left London is I couldn't afford half a million pounds for one bedroom flat. So now I've got more chance of buying a house in London in a few years than I did staying there. [00:07:18] Speaker D: Hopefully we'll get you to move to Italy permanently. You're working on getting a visa, right? [00:07:22] Speaker A: Well, that's the Thing at the moment I don't have a visa. I can only stay 90 out of 180 days. So for the last probably 40 months now, I spent two weeks in miss, two weeks in London. I've been doing that on rotation every month for 40 months now. So at some point it would be nice to spend longer than a couple weeks at a time. But as far as I'm aware, either I get a student visa, which I have to go into college five days a week, four hours a day and you know, I dropped out of uni after first days. [00:07:49] Speaker D: Now they have changed the law. You need to have at least a B1 in Italian in order to get the visa. So you must have the Italian before you can enroll at university. [00:07:58] Speaker A: And the only other option is get a digital nomad visa, which I could probably be accepted for nowadays they'll be [00:08:03] Speaker D: sped up the process. You can get one in probably 45 days. You could also marry an Italian. Just be careful of the husbands. [00:08:09] Speaker A: Basically 20% of the people I bring to Mussomeli realize they don't want to live in Mussomeli actually, they want to live by the beach. And it's just been a rule of thumb. I've realized averagely about 20 of all people end up moving to the beachfront to come to Missouli. [00:08:22] Speaker D: It's funny that you mentioned this thing about people change their minds because like we spoke to this Australian woman and she's like, you know, I need to be some rebels. I'd like to be in Italy, but I'd like to be somewhere else as a full time thing. So finding the few different decent functions is definitely important. There are people for whom mus. But there would also people looking for other things. [00:08:40] Speaker A: Well, I think that's the beauty of Sicily. You know, there's not many places left in the world. You can buy a property for sort of 20 or 30,000. And you know, if you sold your property elsewhere for a couple hundred grand, you can have two, three properties all around Sicily. Jump between each of them, vent them out. [00:08:55] Speaker D: I think people don't understand just how much of it there is on the value. We just bought a house around the corner from here and we paid 50k. And it's big, like 3,000 square feet. [00:09:06] Speaker A: Wow. [00:09:07] Speaker D: But the beauty of it is that it's actually very thriving town. It's near Venice, it's near Alabama, it's near Verola. You can find cheap stuff everywhere. You just have to look. [00:09:15] Speaker A: Yeah. The thing that I've seen changed about most many Most recently is now all the one year houses and the houses under 10k are starting to go. The house under 20k is starting to go. But the biggest change has been the nightly rate per stay. So last time I was, my Cameraman from Channel 4 who came to stay with me, he rented a standard two bedroom apartment in M. He was paying €100 per night on Airbnb. He paid €700 for the week. I couldn't believe it. [00:09:39] Speaker D: I was shocked. [00:09:41] Speaker E: That's a fraction of the house you [00:09:42] Speaker D: just bought, the room where we stayed. But it was also, also had quite a few problems. And 90, that's crazy. [00:09:52] Speaker C: It's even more, more expensive than bigger cities like Milan, Rome. [00:09:56] Speaker E: There was also a lot of like quite good people that were doing things for, you know, social causes, ESG things like the community kitchens, Armenia. He was like trying to set up something with wool that had indirectly met you. So there's a lot of social good going on on the sidelines of all the things you've introduced because you've got people who want to do good in an area where they can afford, you [00:10:17] Speaker D: know, and that's what you can do when you're in a place where you can actually play with property, where you can buy stuff and have a bit of fun with it. There's no way someone can say I'm going to throw 100k at something in London and make a co working space out of it because you're not even going to buy a garage. [00:10:33] Speaker A: There's one guy in Miss who I like a lot. He started with one house, bought it for 20,000. He now owns all six adjoining houses. In the first house, the top floor, he's turned it into a hairdresser studio where he gets a couple young guys and girls just doing hairs. He's turned the bottom floor into a cafe and he's got a license from the mayor to have tables and chairs outside and they've made a communal garden. And he's just turned corner property now into like half the street which he owns. And it cost him like 150 grand in total. And he's got his own little empire, you know, and he gets people on wework who come and work for him for free, for sort of work experience. And you know, he's living like a king. [00:11:11] Speaker E: But then people supporting each other and that kind of lifestyle. People miss and the thing is, if you relocate to a big city or you relocate somewhere, there's no foreigners, you feel very lonely. Whereas that's what Musa Melli has. You have like minded people and you pull them all together to a place so that, that dissipates the loneliness. So I can see how it really works. [00:11:29] Speaker D: It makes a huge difference. [00:11:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know when you live in a place where you're restrained financially and you've got so many bills coming out it's almost a luxury to be able to have all these sort of ideas and go through with them, you know. But because you're not constrained financially or by the mayor, you know there's a lot of freedom to sort of. I say to anyone if you've got 50 grand you can come buy a house and start a business and have a. Which is, you know in London that's like a year's rent. So. [00:11:56] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [00:11:58] Speaker A: No, I mean there's people ask why'd you choose Missomi? I don't really choose Miss Somalia it's just they had a one year house scheme going on and I wanted a cheap house and then because I was there I started promoting it. You know Ms. Smelly is beautiful but you know there's another 10000 towns which look pretty identical to Ms. A Million Around City but you know it really depends who's there and who's promoting it. [00:12:18] Speaker D: So they come over because it's like I'm not going to be the only solar in the town. [00:12:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean my problem is I don't really tend to think things through too much. I just sort of go with the flow and hope for the best and it's planned out pretty well so far. Also I try and show you know a positive side of this. You know a lot of these people who document this process, it's quite negative. They're talking about all this sort of things that have gone wrong. I just try and show doing on a shoe soon budget with not speaking the language, not knowing anyone, you know it's still possible. I see the people who end up in the biggest trouble are the ones who are just trying to throw money at problems all the time when that doesn't really solve the problem a lot of the time just constantly throwing money at the issue. But you learn from your mistakes and fortunately I've not made any costly ones [00:13:00] Speaker E: or so if you do nothing, you don't make any mistakes are the only. You know, that's how you learn, that's how you progress. [00:13:05] Speaker D: It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much George. [00:13:09] Speaker C: That was such a great conversation. [00:13:13] Speaker D: Yeah, he's always full of insights. [00:13:15] Speaker C: I love how honest George is about what he did I mean, absolutely. [00:13:21] Speaker D: We cut out some of the more. More honest, Honest, honest parts. But he's still very honest on record. Anyway, it was a pleasure to talk to him and we're always following what he's doing and it will be interesting to see how the region of Sicily develops, given that the one Euro homes scheme is kind of maxing out and people are starting to look a little bit more further afield for other locations. So I am bullish Sicily over the long term. We shall see. [00:13:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's not just about cheap property, it's about community. It's about building something bigger. And, yeah, finding the right one isn't that easy. [00:14:05] Speaker D: Absolutely. It's mostly about community. I'd say if there's something we learned, it's that. Thank you listeners for being here thus far and for listening to us every week. We really appreciate you and feel free to send us your comments. The last thing I want to mention before going on to enjoy my Saturday brunch is that this week we have launched on Magic Townsend 3, two new indicators which are very, very important. We're going to be talking about this in next week's podcast in a little bit more detail, but we now cover demographic fragility as an indicator on our Town Explorer. It has become clear that a large amount of towns in Italy, almost two thirds of them, are shrinking at a pretty rapid pace. And that, of course, is a dangerous signal for anyone. They may find themselves in a community that will shrink over the next 20 years. So we have crunched the data and simplified it in a way that everyone can understand. Anyone that has access to the Town Explorer or Magic Towns, is that they can now filter by whether a town is solid from a demographic standpoint, meaning likely to do well over the next few years mixed, or if it is in a position of fragility. In those cases, you may want to be thinking twice about what your own needs will be in 10 or 20 years. I hope you're going to enjoy using this. I hope you enjoyed our podcast and I hope you enjoy your weekend. [00:15:37] Speaker E: Thank you, guys. [00:15:38] Speaker C: See you next time. [00:15:39] Speaker A: Thank you, Anna. [00:15:40] Speaker D: Thank you, everyone. [00:15:41] Speaker B: That's it for this week on MagicTowns Italy. You can create a free [email protected] and explore over 2,000 towns, including those offering the 7% tax scheme, as well as download dozens of expat guides. We have over 200 data points per town, more than Italy's statistics authority itself, covering everything from property prices to schools, health care, crime and more. If you want full access to filters and unlimited searches. Upgrade to MagicTown's premium Use the Code podcast for 20% off an annual plan. Thanks for listening. Our next podcast will be live on Saturday at 9:00am.