Detroit Homeowner: I'll Trade House for a Smartphone

But real estate agent says it's 'not worth much'
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 8, 2014 6:00 PM CDT
Guy Willing to Trade His House for an iPhone 6
The house in Detroit that you can buy for an iPhone 6.   (Larry Else)

Want to buy a fixer-upper in Detroit? Probably not, but if you change your mind there's a three-bedroom available in east Detroit for an iPhone 6, ABC News reports. Real estate broker Larry Else admits there are problems, like no front door, broken windows, and $6,000 in back taxes that you'd have to take on. And the neighborhood is "a little dicey," he says. "This house is really not worth much at all." (Else won't even enter the property due to a company policy about entering unsecured houses.) So why try and sell it? For one thing, the owner, who is staying anonymous and lives in Austria, wants it sold before "thousands" of other houses near foreclosure become available by tax auction.

And the property has been a headache from the start. The owner snapped it up in 2010 for $41,000 because he was told it had rental value. Then he learned that the previous owner had bought it just two weeks before for $10,500, says Else: "Public records don't show up that fast." So far, Else is getting offers "ranging in seriousness," reports ABC, and a neighbor tells MyFox Detroit that he's interested: "I work on houses, so I would love to have it for [an iPhone 6]," he says. "It doesn't take a lot of money to fix these houses back up." Meanwhile, Else says the price is negotiable; the owner would accept a 32GB iPad or "anything, maybe an Android." (See why Detroit wants to tear down 40,000 houses.)

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