WATCH ABOVE: A man is willing to sell his Detroit home in exchange for an iPhone6 or an iPad. Sounds like a deal, but, as Emily Mertz explains, there’s a catch.
TORONTO – A Detroit homeowner is reportedly hoping to trade his house for an iPhone 6 or 32GB iPad.
In an interview with ABC News, real estate broker Larry Else said the owner of one of his listings has dropped the price on a three-bedroom home in east Detroit from $5,000 to a new iPhone 6. Else said the owner is “desperate to sell ahead of the area’s tax auction season where ‘thousands’ of homes near foreclosure will flood the market.”
The cost of a brand new, shiny iPhone 6 starts around the $750 price range in Canada. In exchange, the house in Detroit has broken windows and no front door (but it has a roof, we think).
The home has reportedly accrued more than $6,000 in back taxes and is “set to enter foreclosure if the debt is not settled in the new year.”
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“The true cost of the sale comes from the buyer assuming the cost of the back taxes,” said Else, adding that because the owner is selling the property as a quick claim deed, it would be “up to the buyer to arrange either a payment plan or lump sum payment with county officials to settle the back taxes.”
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Else said the owner—who lives in Austria and has never resided in Detroit—bought the house in 2010 for $41,000 after being told he would make a “quick sale” but was uninformed that the person he purchased the home for bought the property for a mere $10,050 just a few weeks earlier.
“Public records don’t show up that fast,” Else said, calling his client “a victim himself” as he was unaware he was paying too much for the home. “This house is really not worth much at all.”
Else said as of Tuesday, he received four offers with one prospect buyer wanting to buy the house for the wood, while another offered to hand over an iPhone 5 and another $850 for the property.
Earlier this year in an effort to fix one of Detroit’s largest problems that consists of thousands of vacant homes, the city launched a website to auction homes to residents with bidding for some properties starting as low as $1,000.
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