How Convenient Is It to Buy a House for 1 Euro in Italy or in France?

Are you sure you can then build your real estate project with predictable costs and without bureaucratic hassles?

By Barbara Di Pietrantonio · International lawyer and luxury real estate strategist

In Sambuca di Sicilia, the town's latest call for its symbolic-price houses contains one sentence most readers pass over. The final deed of sale is signed only after the town has certified the renovation works, and the buyer has 36 months to complete them. For up to three years, you restore a house that on paper still belongs to someone else.

That sentence tells you more about the €1 house than any story about bargain villages. The price is the one figure in the project that never moves. The deposit, the deadlines, the taxes, the permits and the builders all do. So the question worth asking is how much of that you can know before you commit.

To answer it, I read the official documents of three towns: Roubaix in France, Pratola Peligna and Sambuca di Sicilia in Italy.

Two Countries, One Idea, Two Very Different Buyers

The idea is the same on both sides of the Alps. A town has empty, deteriorating buildings and a shrinking or struggling neighbourhood. It offers the property for a symbolic sum, and in exchange you restore it within a deadline the town sets.

The difference lies in whom the town wants to attract.

France wrote its best-known scheme for its own residents. Roubaix launched its maisons à 1 euro on 21 March 2018, with 17 houses. The city's own conditions were explicit: buyers had to qualify for social home-ownership support, be first-time buyers, commit to the renovation budget and live in the house as their main residence for at least six years. Out of 824 application packs collected, 74 applications were filed and 13 houses were assigned. According to the city, 11 of the 13 buyers already lived in Roubaix.

For an international buyer looking for a holiday home or an investment, that door was closed by design. Roubaix built a housing policy, and it worked as one.

Italy opened the door wider, and attached a clock to it. The Italian schemes are run town by town, each with its own rules. Pratola Peligna, in Abruzzo, accepts individuals and companies as buyers, and its guidelines name non-residents among the people it wants to attract. In Sambuca, the 16 houses of the first round all went to foreign buyers, as ANSA reported in 2021.

That openness has a price, and it is paid in time and guarantees.

The Clock Starts Before You Hold the Keys

Here is what the rules in force actually ask of you.

Pratola Peligna (guidelines of December 2022, amended by the town council on 5 December 2024): you sign the purchase with the private owner within two months of visiting the property. You file the renovation project within six months of the deed. You start and finish the works within the legal terms of your building permit. Before the deed, you provide a €5,000 bank or insurance guarantee, released only when you file the completion of works. Earlier press reports mentioned a €10,000 penalty here: that belongs to an older version of the rules, and the guarantee has replaced it.

Sambuca di Sicilia (2024 call, "houses at 3 euro", municipal property): you need a €5,000 deposit simply to take part. The sale is a public auction with sealed bids, rising from a starting price of €3, so the symbolic figure is where the bidding begins. Once awarded, you file the technical documentation within 90 days and complete the renovation within 36 months. Miss either deadline and the award is revoked, along with your deposit. The property is sold as it stands, in its existing physical and legal condition.

Two towns, two sets of deadlines, and both run from the moment you commit, well before you know what the walls contain.

The Costs the Call Hands Over to You

The Pratola guidelines are admirably transparent about who pays what. The buyer takes on every cost of the transfer: notary, taxes, cadastral and technical fees. The buyer also pays the costs of a late succession and of any sanatoria, and reimburses the owner for the local and state property taxes paid while the house waited for a buyer.

Read that list slowly. A late succession means that after a death, the heirs never completed the legal transfer of the property. A sanatoria means that something in the building does not match what was ever authorised, and has to be regularised. Both are paid by you. Neither can be priced until a professional has examined the file.

In Sambuca the principle is the same: every cost needed to reach the deed, from cadastral updates to energy certificates, registration and transcription, falls on the buyer.

The Tax Office Does Not Read the Price

In Italy the deed is signed before a notary and the purchase is subject to registration tax, which is calculated on the value of the property. The euro written in the deed is only one element of that value.

For a second home bought by a private individual, the rate is 9%, and the tax can never be lower than €1,000, whatever the price. Mortgage and cadastral duties add a fixed €50 each. The reduced 2% rate exists, but among its conditions is taking up residence in that municipality within eighteen months: rarely the plan of an international buyer.

A private buyer of a dwelling can ask the notary to use the cadastral value as the tax base, the so-called prezzo-valore system, which also reduces the notary's fees by 30%. That option needs a building registered with a cadastral income, and many ruins have none. Without it, the tax office can assess the market value of what you bought, regardless of the price in the deed. If you buy through a company, the cadastral option does not apply at all.

And since the tax looks at the value on the date of the deed, a scheme like Sambuca's, where the deed follows the renovation, raises a question to put to your notary before you bid, never after.

Legal basis: art. 43 and art. 1 of the Tariff, Part I, of Presidential Decree 131/1986; art. 10 of Legislative Decree 23/2011; art. 1, para. 497, of Law 266/2005. Rules in force at October 2026. A new consolidated code on registration tax, Legislative Decree 123/2025, applies from 1 January 2027: for any deed signed from that date, the figures must be checked against it. Every case must be assessed individually.

Where the Real Budget Lives

The renovation is the project. Everything before it is the entrance fee.

Roubaix is the only one of the three towns that published its numbers. Depending on the size of the house and how much of the work buyers did themselves, the cost of each project ranged from €43,000 to €222,000. Those buyers also received public grants of €32,000 to €36,000 each, tied to the scheme and to their income. An international buyer of a holiday home should not expect them.

In Italy, three costs are particularly hard to estimate from abroad, and they are the ones that stretch a three-year plan.

The structure. Both Italian towns sit in earthquake country, and the official maps say so. Pratola Peligna is in seismic zone 1, the highest of Italy's four categories, under the classification the Abruzzo Region confirmed in 2024. Sambuca di Sicilia is in zone 2 under the Sicilian Region's 2022 update, with several nearby towns of the Belice valley in zone 1. Structural reinforcement is engineering work, and its price depends on what the walls turn out to be once they are opened.

The constraints. A building in a historic centre may be subject to heritage or landscape protection. When it is, the project needs the approval of the competent Soprintendenza, with its own timetable and its own opinion of your windows.

The builders. A village that is losing residents is usually losing craftsmen too. You may find that the two firms available are booked for the next year. Your deadline does not move with their calendar.

What Nobody Tells You About the €1 House

This is the part that matters most to a careful buyer, and only some of it is about money.

You may be improving a house that is not yet yours. Under Italian civil law, whatever is built on land belongs to the owner of that land, unless the title or the law provides otherwise (art. 934 of the Civil Code). Where the final deed comes after the works, as in Sambuca, the preliminary agreement is the document that protects your investment. It deserves a lawyer's reading before you sign it.

The deadline belongs to the town. The risk belongs to you. Every delay I described, from the engineer to the heritage office to the builder, is a delay you do not control, running against a clock you accepted. The deposit is the visible part of that risk. The invisible part is a project you have paid for and cannot finish in time.

The title is only as clean as its history. In schemes like Pratola's, the town introduces you to private owners. Many are heirs, sometimes several of them, in different countries. Before any money moves, someone must confirm that the seller can actually sell: every heir accounted for, no mortgage still registered, and the building on site matching the building on the cadastral map. A house can cost €1 and still be impossible to transfer cleanly.

Resale is a separate question. A restored house in a village with few buyers has a market of few buyers. If your plan includes renting it out or selling it one day, the scheme says nothing about who will be there to rent or buy.

The schemes do exactly what they say, and they say it in writing. They transfer to the buyer the part of the project the town could not afford to carry. That is a fair exchange only for someone who has priced it.

My own work sits at the other end of the price scale, with properties valued in the tens of millions. The files are thicker, but the first questions are the ones a €1 house raises: who can actually sell, what was ever authorised, and what binds the land. The price has never answered any of them.

Who It Suits, and Who Should Walk Away

The €1 house can be a beautiful decision for someone who wants to spend real time in one specific place, has the patience and the budget to restore a building properly, and sees the restoration itself as part of the reward. Ideally, someone who can be present, or who has a trusted architect on the ground.

It makes far less sense for anyone who needs predictability: a defined budget, a defined date, a property that can be rented or resold in a liquid market. For that buyer, a correctly priced house in the right micro-market will often cost less in the end than a symbolic one in the wrong place. The time saved is rarely counted, and it should be.

The Question to Ask Before Any Price

Whether a house costs €1 or €10 million, the price is the figure you already know. What decides the outcome is everything you do not yet know: the legal status of the property, the constraints on it, the real cost of making it what you need, and the market you will one day sell into.

That analysis belongs before the choice of property, never after. It is the work I do with my clients, and in my experience it is the step buyers are most tempted to skip when the price looks too good to question.

Have you ever looked seriously at a €1 house, in Italy or in France? I would be curious to know what made you stop, or what made you go ahead.

Sources: Ville de Roubaix, press release "Maison à 1 euro avec travaux", 14 November 2018. Comune di Pratola Peligna, guidelines "Case a 1 Euro a Pratola Peligna" (December 2022) and Giunta resolution no. 177 of 5 December 2024. Comune di Sambuca di Sicilia, call "Case ad 3 euro" (2024). ANSA, 22 July 2021. Seismic zones: Regione Abruzzo, list of municipalities annexed to the 2024 update under OPCM 3519/2006; Regione Siciliana, Giunta resolution no. 81 of 24 February 2022. Italian legislation as cited above.

This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. Each scheme changes with every new call, and every property must be assessed individually against the current official documents.