There’s an Italian farmhouse on the Cheap Houses EU Instagram account that I have my eye on. It has red shutters, stone brickwork and a chicken coop out the back, and while the 1970s interiors are straight out of a horror film, for €65,000 – the price of a deposit on a one-bedroom flat in London – it has potential.
Instagram is full of escapist accounts like this. The largest, with nearly 3 million followers, is Cheap Old Houses, which features historic properties in far-flung parts of America and Europe being sold for less than $100,000. It’s run by Elizabeth Finkelstein, a historic preservationist, and her husband Ethan, who works in digital marketing, who relocated from Brooklyn to upstate New York to a soon-to-be-demolished 18th-century house they bought for $70,000. They want to show that home ownership is possible if you’re willing to get creative with the old and unorthodox: a church, a fishing depot or a historic home in need of restoring to its former glory, in deindustrialised communities in rust-belt America and depopulated regions of rural France and Spain. “The average home price in America is almost half a million dollars right now,” says Elizabeth. “We felt that this was a solution – sort of a hack to the system – to get people in the door, but also to save beautiful old houses.”
